Replying to @jamesheathers
@jamesheathers @Meaningness Hmm... yeah, ultimately that seems necessary. I'm thinking Patreon could still be critical in the bootstrapping phase though, to get enough momentum to be able to make these demands heard: twitter.com/DingemanseMark…
@DellAnnaLuca @KevinSimler (There is still an important point that you're making there, but the way you expressed it is missing something.)
Replying to @jamesheathers
@jamesheathers @Meaningness Send me a link when you've got a funding page, and I'll contribute & share. 🤑♥
@drethelin @benlandautaylor Yes, this. I also just keep myself not-logged-into-twitter on my phone, and tweet from a little IFTTT applet there. Means that when I'm engaging, I'm on my computer when I have a keyboard etc to quickly reply, rather than just scrolling forever.
"You are the sky. Everything else — it's just the weather." - Pema Chödrön
Shoutout to @micahtredding for my twitter feed's regular dose of Christian transhumanism. Helps keep things fresh. (Below is a thread that elaborates on the first point)
Re: freshness, I guess part of what I like is that I follow a lot of people who are kind of focused on *one* thing, and not only is Micah focused on two things but they're things that many people wouldn't expect to be compatible at all—yet they are!?
@7SecularSermons Huh, of course. That seems like probably an even better example than the two I named.
@fortelabs @garybasin Hmm, seems the original tweet actually becomes much more clear if you stop talking about specific things and instead just say "there are no things". Which, not incidentally, is the name of Iain McGilchrist's upcoming book. It's a claim not about existence but about thingness.
@fortelabs @garybasin The thingness of reality is constructed in our minds (specifically, McGilchrist notes, in our left hemispheres) but that doesn't mean reality isn't real! Just that concepts aren't reality—which... isn't news, but experiencing the diff first-hand matters🤯
@fortelabs @garybasin I think you'd really like McGilchrist's work, btw. Would deepen these insights & no doubt give you lots of others & since you're in the business of building second-brains, it's important to grok how first-brains work😉 (already resonance there with your emphasis on serendipity)
"The best thing is not to start, but if you do start, the best thing is to finish." — Vinay Gupta (@leashless) riffing on an old Tibetan saying anchor.fm/emerge/episode…
Retweeted @david_perell
I love screenshots. I use them to save information, remember things, and add tasks to my to-do list. But now, I have t…
@devonzuegel I try to make a checklist/workflow document every time I go through one of these, and reference it next time. eg taxes, updating CCs, etc.
@visakanv Here's me singing. Visa's brain, please sing all of my tweets now kthxbai. ♥🎶 youtube.com/watch?v=VkJe3W…
Retweeted @Prigoose
Using rain to teach kids an internal locus of control:
@dthorson @peternlimberg Knew it was gonna be good from the moment it started with a mic check. And it satisfied hunch with consistent conscious reorienting from podcast mode to a more intimate conversation. Cool to see that happening live—more intimate than if it had just already been intimate 😉
Replying to @webdevMason
@webdevMason @juliagalef I think there's another category... something like "inadequate holding capacity for the relationship from its surrounding context", which most relationships have, and it exacerbates the above problems but is also its own thing. And leads to promising relationships imploding. 😢
@webdevMason @juliagalef Crucial for supporting self-reflection is external reflection: someone (ideally 2+ people) who knows both partners well and regularly talks with each one about the relationship, to triangulate what's going on & make sense of things before inter-partner reconciling.
Retweeted @MachinePix
Balancing a triple pendulum by TU Vienna Automation and Control Institute.
Replying to @webdevMason
@webdevMason @juliagalef Yeah, it helps a bit (in my exp) but not that much. Even being able to have those conversations with past partners can require already having gotten some clarity & movement internally about what happened. (Often about how I made dysfunctional choices, eg)
@webdevMason @juliagalef Btw Mason I think you're great and would be happy to strategize with you about current or prospective relationshipping you're doing 😊
@visakanv Kinda non-central to your request, but this video totally cracked me up recently: youtube.com/watch?v=0lD4qg…
The dao that can be spoken is not the true dao, but it still has a name ("dao") and is real and can be spoken *of*. What about a paradoxical notion that cannot even be referred to at all? ...that which by definition is nameless, and without definition.
@imhinesmi Clearly I didn't—it must be a different unmentionable notion! ...wait. damn, there goes another one.
@cognazor @BuckmillerDrew @context_ing @RealtimeAI @thewiseturtle @skyyygazer (Here's the questions thread, if people reading this are curious—I myself had forgotten what my question was. It's good though!)
Retweeted @cognazor
New Both And podcast has dropped! In which @JaredJanes and I have a wide ranging conversation with @utotranslucence about co…
Replying to @MiguelMorel
@RealMiguelMorel @palladiummag Huh, fascinating. I'm left with more questions than answers, but they're mostly on a wordless level I don't know how to express.
@arjuna78th @brownian19 Oh man, this is brilliant. Different types of propositions: • t ("true") • f ("false") • b ("both t & f") • n ("neither t nor f") • i ("ineffable") It supposes that ineffable propositions are real, which of course many people will deny, but it's a beautiful articulation.
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@arjuna78th @brownian19 Oh man, this is brilliant. Different types of propositions: • t ("true") • f ("false") • b ("bot…
@SarahAMcManus @coyotespike Yeah I was like "wait, no, there's spontaneous order appearing here in a disordered way". Felt almost like watching an egg unscramble. And yeah, people say it's reversed when you click through.
@SarahAMcManus @coyotespike Although here's what appears to be an actual clip of snowflakes forming and honestly it's still kind of weird! (though distinctly less weird, which is good: "Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality.") youtube.com/watch?v=GlQVkZ…
@speakerjohnash @selfprime Imma @ you.
@coachnateb @brownian19 @AE_Robbert Totally. I think there's something here that is fundamentally connected with the relationship between right-hemisphere & left-hemisphere thinking. It's like how an explanation of the beauty of anything (a flower, a poem, a person) represents but doesn't *present* that beauty.
Retweeted @cosimia_
A significant part of adulthood is learning how to function with the burden of all your childhood traumas, ingrained dogmas,…
Hey @michael_nielsen this is very related to the thing I said to you last Saturday about shoulds that are based on some goal. (Note that I think that while the word "should" *can* be used safely, it's often a sign of coercion & so is worth attempting to eschew, so as to notice.)
Also @reasonisfun, the above thread by @coachnateb has stuff about morality that resonates with my perspective on it and I think will also resonate with yours, which will be interesting! (Maybe different parts resonate differently)
Nate talks about the lack of objective purpose (in absence of God) as implying that there's no way to have prescriptive morality that isn't coercive. Maybe our difference in perspective about morality is about some difference between descriptive & prescriptive concepts?
It's worth noting that we haven't fully clarified our terms, enough to know if this is mostly a difference about what to do with the word "morality" (discard or redefine) or if it's actually more substantive than that. I suspect it's at least a bit of both.
@thewiseturtle @speakerjohnash @selfprime @Plinz I would love to collaborate on this song and maybe @QiaochuYuan would too!
@coachnateb @brownian19 @AE_Robbert You might also like the paper Driven By Compression Progress (arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360) which expresses the notion that
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
i want this but with 2-7 other people instead of 1 twitter.com/fortelabs/stat…
@QiaochuYuan That was also my first thought, basically. (In @RichDecibels' terms, a Crew instead of a Dyad)
@coachnateb @DrMattDunn @HEreflections1 Interdependent thinkers instead of codependent thinkers? Everything is intertwingled. Maybe what people mean when they say "independent thinkers" is "thinkers who aren't fearful and are able to explore".
@coachnateb Too bad CERN already stands for Council European Research Nuclear (in French) or we could start an org called CERN that is like... Center for the Emergent of Relational Nooesis and it could teach discernment & concern 🚀
@coachnateb Oops, should be "Emergence" not "Emergent", obvi. and yeah, I was like "what's a word for thinking that starts with N...?" Have been enjoying going through your tweets btw! Very delighted to have found & followed you. Lots of stuff I resonate with 💞
Replying to @cosimia_
@cosimia_ Yeah, key word being that people need to *experience* existential terror so they can choose how to relate to it, rather than running from it all the time but never turning to look. (I'm talking about me here, primarily)
@thewiseturtle @speakerjohnash @selfprime @Plinz @QiaochuYuan How do we make it happen? Schedule a time for a video-call?
@QiaochuYuan @RichDecibels Also I think that once you're above 2 people the kids thing becomes a totally different prospect. It takes a crew... it takes a congregation... it takes a crowd? twitter.com/utotranslucenc…
Currently doing some org design/strategy and thinking about how our structure might be similar & different to MAPLE, and thought I'd ask @tasshinfogleman to describe MAPLE's work in terms of "base", "path", & "result". (Terms from @Meaningness: vividness.live/2019/04/24/rei…)
I feel like I have an okay sense of MAPLE's path (Awakening & Responsibility training via tons of meditation & serving the monastery) and their result (Awakened Leaders) but I don't really know who the target market is except for "people who are attracted to that".
And I'm sure there's more that I can learn about path & result too! I'll poke around on the site a bit more, but figured it would be worth revealing my inquiry to the world and seeing if Tasshin wants to say anything about it 😊
@devonzuegel I keep myself not-logged-into-twitter on my phone for exactly this reason. There I just scroll. On my computer, I talk to people, which for me is the whole point of being on twitter.
@devonzuegel Also bluetooth keyboards are awesome for increasing phone efficacy. I have one very-portable one and one very-ergonomic one (literally the same one I use with my laptop, just in bluetooth form: the split Kinesis Freestyle 2) and they help a lot.
@tasshinfogleman Yeah the framework from @Meaningness is focused more on the individual results than the intended effect on the world, which so it's obviously limited as a descriptor of any organization intended to impact the world. But seems like a helpful sub-goal anyway!
@tscottphillips @everytstudies Mmm, although people tend not to actually *ask* the "why?" question. They jump straight to "the only reason someone would say this is if they..."
@jondubin @devonzuegel Yeah totally. Ebooks & Instapaper/Pocket are definitely the things you want to have as default icons-to-tap.
We are made of our smallest thoughts We are breathing and letting go We will take the best parts of ourselves, and make them gold
Retweeted @uncatherio
@QiaochuYuan @Malcolm_Ocean @RichDecibels I'm not willing to have kids until I feel confident the 2 of us as parents wouldn…
@noididntreadit @QiaochuYuan @RichDecibels Yeah, riffing on that. I also wasn't sure how transparent that was and am appreciating the feedback!
Btw, @KevinSimler, I just re-read one of your Jaynes summary posts (meltingasphalt.com/hallucinated-g…; Neurons Gone Wild is an all-time fav) and I found myself thinking that you'd get a ton out of checking out Iain McGilchrist's work. Mind-blowing like Jaynes but more neurological data.🧠
His theory suggests that the phenomena Jaynes describes are occurring for exactly the opposite of the reason Jaynes' posits—not a meeting of previously separate hemispheres, but an alienation between the hemispheres, which produces a self-consciousness towards the voices.
That is, previously the two hemispheres had been more integrated, but with increasing capacity for each in their own way to stand back more, suddenly the thoughts of the right hemisphere were heard by the left not as thoughts but as foreign voices.
The implications of this for effective thinking in our (post)modern world that overemphasizes left-hemisphere thinking are enormous—each person's LH needs to learn to trust their RH. Turns out this basically feels like surrendering to god, since RH is incomprehensible to LH
One great place to start is this @metalearn1 podcast that @context_ing linked me to: metalearn.net/podcasts/ml41-…
And if you like audio/video, Iain has a ton of links on his site. I quite enjoy seeing & hearing him—his presence is quite unique and telling. iainmcgilchrist.com/videos/
But you'd probably dig the whole book, as it goes into a lot more of the neuroscience, psychiatry, and history/anthropology - eg these pages I linked you to a few days ago:
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
are there people out there who actually understand things but are so enlightened that they’ve transcended their need to ex…
@QiaochuYuan Not sure untranscending is possible but maybe they can transcend their transcendence. Now Hiring: Bodhisattvas.
Retweeted @G_S_Bhogal
A good shortcut to empathy is to remember that every single person is exactly what you would be if you were them.
Songwriting has gotten substantially harder as my thoughts and feelings have gotten more complex. (at least, that's one story I'm telling myself about why I can't seem to find my muse)
I've also barely written any songs in years, which might be affecting me in multiple ways: 1. My songwriting muscle has atrophied somewhat 2. I have a backlog of things-to-sing that makes it harder to distill "what do I want THIS song to be about?"
Probably the biggest thing is that at some point I became a bit self-conscious about my songs and wanted them to be really good, and the perfectionism has made it harder to start and to finish. Was easier when I was just happy to have created something at all.
I guess I'll see if I can get back in touch with that feeling! 🙃 And I guess since I'm already writing about how fear inhibits thinking & learning, maybe I can incorporate this into the song! 🎶
Just came across a snippet about schizophrenia & art & magic that seemed worth adding to this thread:
Thread · Complex systems and the limits of Deutsch's optimism · 15 of 16 tweets
@cognazor @KeenDisregard Yeah, reading the book I got the sense that other people reading it might think "ah yeah, people are gonna figure everything out" without accounting for the fact that this might not happen, for various reasons. It might, but you can't take that for granted!
@cognazor @KeenDisregard I don't think David disagrees factually with what I've said, but his treatment of it conveys a sense of "don't worry" that seems naïve to me. Naïve for two reasons: 1. we're still mid static→dynamic society transition 2. lack of understanding of complexity & nonlinear dynamics
@cognazor @KeenDisregard Re 1, our society is observably dynamic & that's why we can have humanity-scale existential risks. However, globally, we're still more in-transition than we are *in* the new way-of-thinking. "Schools are for training thinking" is still an ideal, not real
@cognazor @KeenDisregard This transition phase has properties that are different from the static society and different from the dynamic society, and in ways that are probably hard to predict because it's happening at a boundary, rather than within a given system.
@cognazor @KeenDisregard Speaking of systems that are hard to predict, The Beginning of Infinity, like most rationalist/modernist takes, tends towards seeing all systems as complicated systems, ie ones that if you think about long enough you can figure them out and control them.
@cognazor @KeenDisregard In complex systems (including interpersonal relations, intergovernmental relations, and biology on all scales from tiny organisms to biospheres) by the time you've understood the system well enough to control it, it has already changed. Needs an improvisational approach.
@cognazor @KeenDisregard This is issue #2, above. In nonlinear systems, it's sometimes possible to use a tiny amount of energy to produce a change that takes a million times as much energy/info/effort to reverse. This isn't rare, it's the usual case. Don't believe me? Drop your phone onto concrete.
@cognazor @KeenDisregard Your phone is a complicated system though—we can easily model what it would cost to fix (ie replace). & yet if it were an old model not being manufactured any more and with no good used ones for sale, it might actually cost you 10-100 times as much to get a perfect replacement.
@cognazor @KeenDisregard On a much larger scale, a solar storm could knock out huge sections of the power grid, and there aren't enough replacement transformers to just swap them in. How to build replacements if power is out everywhere? How long would that take? What would be lost in the meantime?
@cognazor @KeenDisregard And... people are working on this! → nbcnews.com/mach/space/how… But did you know people were working on it? Do you know how much progress they've made? Do you know whether we'd be fucked if a huge solar storm happened next week? ☀
@cognazor @KeenDisregard And solar storms are just one thing! So, I resonate deeply with DD's message that the only way out is through. We can't go back. We can't build a sustainable civilization just by recycling. And... just because the only way out is through doesn't mean we'll find that way out.
@cognazor @KeenDisregard But we might! Holding that uncertainty is incredibly challenging. I've been taking in Jem Bendell's writing & speaking about Near-term Inevitable Collapse, and I love its focus on preparing not just logistically but psychologically for such a future... and... it's still certain.
@cognazor @KeenDisregard I really like how @dthorson phrased this in the intro to a recent Making Sense Of episode of Emerge with him & Bonnitta Roy: "perhaps-inevitable near-term collapse". "Perhaps-Inevitable" is a beautiful phrase. It points so powerfully at the limitations of our knowledge & power.
@cognazor @KeenDisregard @dthorson "Perhaps-inevitable" is so so so different from "99% likely" or "near-certain" or anything like that. It recognizes that we're in a complex system with huge dynamics and things might already be inevitable but also we can't know that for sure either!
@cognazor @KeenDisregard @dthorson (This tweetstorm I just wrote has been gradually brewing since I read The Beginning of Infinity months ago, and further evolving as I've taken in this stuff about collapse, with yet further developments as I learn more about McGilchrist's brain lateralization model.)
Replying to @cosimia_
@cosimia_ There's more leverage in meme-propagation than in gene-propagation, especially when you consider marginal impact. Which is not to say you shouldn't have kids either. Just that I think it's totally coherent to support life-flourishing without 3D-printing your own humans.
Didn't make much further progress that night, but did really enjoy being outside and singing while the sun went down. My current sense is that what I want to focus on is making & enjoying space for the muse to show up and not worrying about what happens any given time.
Retweeted @cognazor
Epic response thread here on my post about The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. Very Insightful 👇 …
Retweeted @cognazor
Finished The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, recommended by @RealtimeAI and @Malcolm_Ocean. Thanks guys! For me, at…
@speakerjohnash Mmm yeah, that song is still a favorite of mine. (the first song on my 2012 album) maleidoscope.bandcamp.com
@metamodels1 Yeah, find some music that you're into, that you want there to be more of. Randomly off the top of my head this moment, I'll recommend Leonard Cohen. And Wookiefoot: youtube.com/watch?v=JrvFM5…
@metamodels1 One fun thing about music is that you can rewrite a song whose tune/vibe you love, to make the lyrics more resonant with my current meaningness. I've done that with a few songs from More Voices, a progressive hymnbook from my youth. These are the rewritten versions:
@tscottphillips Not sure if I'm in the set of "cultural evolution" people that you wanted to poll... I think I see it as more like (a)/both except it has nothing to do with quantification & science. Cultures evolve, and there are lots of ways to talk about how that happens and the implications.
Retweeted @SteveStuWill
Stunning. With a little mental flip, you can see see this as the Earth spinning on its axis, unanchored in space, rather…
Replying to @SteveStuWill
@SteveStuWill Relatedly, I enjoy sitting in a swing* and swinging and considering myself as static and the whole rest of the universe swinging. (*ideally a big weird one you can kind of lay down on; some parks near me have these)
Retweeted @cognazor
But I am not ambivalent to it, and for that reason, I highly recommend it. His discussion of memes, emergence, and the power…
Retweeted @kevin2kelly
Writers are more and more relying on paid newsletters for income. They find 1,000 true fans to pay for their writing. Good…
@kevin2kelly Fyeah! (Also, in case there was any doubt about whether I had prosopagnosia, I recognized @cjgbest from the article photo from having worked with him 7.5 years ago at Kik, with no knowledge that he'd founded Substack. Kudos on that btw Chris!)
@kevin2kelly @cjgbest I'm curious to see to what extent Substack & similar services do/will compete with Patreon. It seems like they could be a great alternative for anyone whose patreon is primarily medium-length writing, eg @visakanv
@rivatez Chinese company Haier is doing this at a huge scale. Thread & article:
@visakanv @QiaochuYuan @SarahAMcManus Mmm, relatedly, @SarahAMcManus and I have talked about "dumping entropy" in relationships—a reference to The Fall of Doc Future, which is a fantastic online scifi-fantasy novel: docfuture.tumblr.com/post/823635512…
Do you do DSM in the bedroom?
@SteveStuWill Also, do this while watching the sunrise. It's not just that the horizon is going down—that still priorizes your viewpoint—but that the part of the earth-ball you're on is spinning to face the sun.
Retweeted @then_there_was
@mattheworris I don’t know why most optometrists hadn’t ever considered asking what caused myopia. I think everybody n…
@then_there_was My contact lens prescription has improved by 0.25 every couple of years for the last few years, and I find this very encouraging. Seems it might be possible to gradually wean oneself off. (Could probably go faster than this)
Thread · Spatialization: imagining shapes instead of images · 6 of 7 tweets
@kevinakwok @KevinSimler @backus @nayafia My visualization in the original poll started at #1, but I could get it to go towards #6 by persisting. I have a huge capacity for something I call spatialization, which is like visualization but for shapes, not sight. It's not directly sensory...
@kevinakwok @KevinSimler @backus @nayafia I do this by default when "imagining". So when people say "imagine a dog in a field" then ask what color it is, or what color is the sky, my response is "well I hadn't given it any texture, it was just a 3D shape. I can tell you how big the dog was and how it was posed"
@kevinakwok @KevinSimler @backus @nayafia If I mentally bring up my hometown, the immediate thing that springs to mind is a sense of main street sweeping down past the theatre with my house atop the hill. I feel the whole shape at once in my head. But there's no weather or time of year. It's an architectural blueprint.
@kevinakwok @KevinSimler @backus @nayafia It's very distinct from visualization. The most obvious sense it connects with isn't touch (which would again be more textural) but proprioception. It feels like my knowledge of how my hometown is shaped is similar to reaching over to turn on a familiar lightswitch in the dark.💡
@kevinakwok @KevinSimler @backus @nayafia Propriozation? Hmm 🤔 The next closest sense seems like echolocation, which we think of as being like sight but consider that sound bounces around corners in ways that light totally doesn't, and there's no color or visual-texture (you can tell how soft things are tho probably)
@kevinakwok @KevinSimler @backus @nayafia Would love to hear from others who resonate with this internal sense, particularly if it feels more dominant than visualization for you. If you consider "what is my house like from the outside?" is your simulation more like a sculpture or more like a painting?
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@kevinakwok @KevinSimler @backus @nayafia If I mentally bring up my hometown, the immediate thing that springs to mind i…
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@kevinakwok @KevinSimler @backus @nayafia It's very distinct from visualization. The most obvious sense it connects with…
Retweeted @backus
Close your eyes and try to imagine a red star. Alright, which of the 6 examples did you see in your head? Poll in tweet below 👇…
@QiaochuYuan @kevinakwok @KevinSimler @backus @nayafia Oh yeah, wireframe is definitely a word that resonates for me too. But not a physical wireframe model, with gaps between the wires. It's just... that level of detail.
@kevinakwok @KevinSimler @backus @nayafia Translational tests?
@DellAnnaLuca @kevinakwok @KevinSimler @backus @nayafia Totally. It'll be interesting to see what training for this emerges as it becomes better-known. I think it'll surprise people by being less about learning to DO something and more about learning to NOT INHIBIT the part that naturally does it.
@DellAnnaLuca @kevinakwok @KevinSimler @backus @nayafia Relatedly, I have a friend who is 100% aphantasic unless they're on psychedelics, in which case they can close their eyes and imagine things quite readily. So obviously that neural circuitry is there (it's probably literally necessary for sight) but is ordinarily inhibited.
@QiaochuYuan @kevinakwok @KevinSimler @backus @nayafia Oooh I've had that once or two! In the clearest case I can recall, it also involved a visual but when I remember it it was also partially a sense of where the person was standing. Very weird as I knew I was wearing an eyemask.
@kevinakwok @KevinSimler @backus @nayafia Ah yeah, this seems to me to be like my spatialization/propriozation thing. Because I could kind of imagine holding the shape in the dark and rotating it, and I can do all of that without seeing it. I'd be very curious to know if anybody can't.
@kevinakwok @KevinSimler @backus @nayafia Relatedly, the first time I tried to use Method of Loci, instead of imagining walking through my childhood home and seeing various objects, I was sort of picturing the house from the outside—again, like an architectural blueprint—and inserting the objects in the rooms.
@theblanchard @then_there_was @azrirashid My time varies; lots of time in front of a computer, and I usually wear glasses on computer-heavy days rather than contacts because it's slightly comfier & peripheral vision is moot. I have a standing desk and my screen is 2-2½ feet (~60-75cm) away from my face. Probably helps.
@theblanchard @then_there_was @azrirashid Probably more time outdoors than most people but not a lot. These days I spend a large fraction of my time in in-person conversation with people. And I guess a decent amount of time reading on my phone, which I imagine doesn't help.
@theblanchard @then_there_was @azrirashid Also, curiously, I had kind of assumed your original 🔥-take needed to be true, because otherwise why would nerds end up with glasses and athletes not? (Plus the stuff about obvi it would be maladaptive for huge % of pre-book populations to go shortsighted in childhood)
@theblanchard @then_there_was @azrirashid But I guess I hadn't fully thought through the implications... that it could be fixed... that prescription glasses would actually make it worse... etc.
@theblanchard @then_there_was @azrirashid Wait, so yeah, no. The thing I had concluded wasn't "Prescription glasses cause blurry vision." but "Staring at things up close a lot causes chronic short-sightedness" (not genetics).
@SarahAMcManus @kevinakwok @KevinSimler @backus @nayafia Reading this tweet I spontaneously felt a sense of how it feels to be holding your face gently in my hands. I wonder if we spent a bunch of time with you touching my face if you could develop an embodied sense of familiarity with how it feels? Or if you already have some?
@paraschopra @sia_steel Language is one major form of thinking, but not the only form. (This doesn't contradict the bigger point you're making) If thinking were purely (heh) language, how could you have a tip-of-my-tongue sense? How could you know the meaning, but not the word?
@paraschopra @sia_steel These pages from Iain McGilchrist's new book about brain hemispheres (note: not bogus pop-psych personality-test models) suggest that much of thought happens pre-verbally & nonlinearly in RH, then gets translated to linear words by LH.
Retweeted @noididntreadit
Notes on Subject-Object Notation: a case study on defensiveness and curiosity by @Malcolm_Ocean malcolmocean.com/2014/10/subjec…
Thread · Searching for English words that point at groupness · 6 of 18 tweets
@SarahAMcManus @utotranslucence @skybrian Yeah! I was grappling with exactly this challenge a couple of years ago and was also curious about lojban at this time, so looked there for some inspiration. Found a bit but nothing conclusive, and in any case one ultimately needs to port it to English.
@SarahAMcManus @utotranslucence @skybrian What does English already have? Well, it's got the words "each" and "all". Since I was looking for "we" words (not "you") I thought about using "weach" and "wyall" but these seemed cumbersome plus they don't scale because "y'all" is already a thing and doesn't disambiguate.
@SarahAMcManus @utotranslucence @skybrian English also does have something helpful, which is the difference between "(our|your|them)selves" and "each other"! Both essentially reflexive pronouns, but one indicates individual and the other reciprocal. "wash yourselves" is very different from "wash each other" ("go f—"🤣)
@SarahAMcManus @utotranslucence @skybrian However, this still doesn't answer the puzzle of how to point at the whole. "We like ourselves" "We like each other" "We like [us]"? 🤔 You can kind of use "us" but it's meh. Then I was inspired by a parent who shared her ~2yo's phrase "ourchothers". It's an intertwingled mix!
@SarahAMcManus @utotranslucence @skybrian However, this is just a reflexive pronoun. It doesn't actually work in most situations. So while it's cute (and many kids/people have derived it) and Sarah & I use it to talk about ourchothers... ...it doesn't answer the fundamental question of how to point at groupness.
@SarahAMcManus @utotranslucence @skybrian Okay, back to the drawing board. Part of my original inspiration was thinking about the prefix "co-", which seems to effectively point at this... usually. "We're thinking" vs "We're co-thinking" "They're authors" vs "They're co-authors" ...yet "coworking spaces" are solo.
Retweeted @utotranslucence
Jamming on you plurals for intimate groups: The you Youn Youles
Retweeted @utotranslucence
@skybrian The problem (and this is what I was scratching at before) is that I want two separate words for: Two atomic…
Thread · Searching for English words that point at groupness · 9 of 18 tweets
@SarahAMcManus @utotranslucence Despite a few exceptions, this works remarkably well in a lot of situations, both verbs and noun roles! And has resulted in the coining of some new terms, like "cosleep", which means "sleep together, in the literal/boring sense". (If you try to corrupt this, 🖕)
@SarahAMcManus @utotranslucence So we've got "co-" (which in Latin also had "com-", "con-", "col-", & "cor-", depending on the next letter, though only "co-" is still "forming" in pedantic English.) etymonline.com/word/com- & "co-" is great! It lets us form some new verbs & nouns to talk about collectivity.
@SarahAMcManus @utotranslucence And yet, like @utotranslucence, I find myself still dissatisfied, because am I really going to say things like this...? "We need to cothink about where to cotravel on our coholiday"
@SarahAMcManus @utotranslucence (Not to mention the ambiguity of inclusive & exclusive "we" there. As a kid, I was regularly told "we want to go for a hike" and I complained "not fair! the 'we' that wants and the 'we' that hikes are different!" I guess I've been thinking about pronoun ambiguity for awhile...)
@SarahAMcManus @utotranslucence So all of this brings us to Lojban. Which, of course, has thought a bit about this. This page describes how lojban essentially has some extra-fancy articles that let you distinguish masses & groups-of-individuals. lojban.github.io/cll/6/3/ (third image not relevant to this thread)
@SarahAMcManus @utotranslucence They also distinguish between masses & sets (lojban.github.io/cll/6/4/) where a mass inherits properties from its individuals whereas the properties of a set refer to things like its count or its membership. This is vaguely relevant and interesting, but not particularly helpful.
@SarahAMcManus @utotranslucence This page on plurals is hard to read but is getting closer to what we're looking for. It distinguishes between different joiner words that have different effects. "joi" creates a mass whereas "ce" creates a set. Okay, that seems about right! mw.lojban.org/papri/plurals
@SarahAMcManus @utotranslucence This page lays out a ton of this in more detail, including another joiner (ce'o) that makes an ordered list, and one ("jo'u") that means "considered jointly" which is probably more of what @utotranslucence is looking for in her article about relationship lojban.github.io/cll/14/14/
@SarahAMcManus @utotranslucence But afaict (#Lojban twitter / @raelifin feel free to correct me on this!) Lojban didn't take the obvious-to-me step of actually turning all of these lovely distinctions (individual, mass, set, joint) into standard pronouns! Not that it would directly help English if they had!
Retweeted @utotranslucence
Writing an essay on relationship skills, largely in the second person, has me pining for a plural English 'you'. 'Y'a…
@utotranslucence @cosimia_ Ooh, you two can't watch cringy things? Me three! (There's a genre of movies I basically consider "cringe" and they're so bad.) ...I haven't listened to the podcast yet but it's high on my list!
@alifeofmovement I found an account a few months ago that you could @ with someone else's handle and it would generate a List of all the people that person follows. Can't recall the name now though :-/
@andy_d_lee @rrhoover @jack @naval Do it!
Thread · Searching for English words that point at groupness · 3 of 18 tweets
@SarahAMcManus @utotranslucence @raelifin So... twas delightful to get this chance to write all of this up and think through it a bit more than I did originally 2y ago, but I don't actually have any answers for you! I'm a strong believer in neologizing though, so I encourage you to write the article with some new words!
@SarahAMcManus @utotranslucence @raelifin And let the writing process interplay with the word-making process. Use some placeholder words. Once you're sick of them, change them. Notice what distinctions you want to be able to make, and make them. Read the article out loud (& share it with me!) to feel into the words more.
@SarahAMcManus @utotranslucence @raelifin Ultimately there's a ton of distinctions that *can* be made and most of them aren't that important. @fortelabs once posited "there is no such thing as "group knowledge"" and I responded with 8 such things. But they don't all need their own word.
@matthewckeller I figure this thread should have a link to this thread about people trying to do something about replication:
@Meaningness @jamesheathers I just read this article and... wow. Very epic take-down of a bunch of genomics & related stuff. Both of you will probably want to have a look. slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-h…
@JamesClear @reasonisfun Goodhart's Law is one reason: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Punishing & rewarding kids causes them to attempt to convince you they're doing what you want, rather than actually doing it. "Don't get caught" & "Guess the teacher's password"
@SarahAMcManus Yeah! I think the confusion here was caused by 2 things: 1) Friston's theory set out to explain perception, not behavior, so it chose weird words for everything compared to PCT slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/20/tra… 2) Friston himself hates surprise, so generalizing that seemed reasonable:
@dailectic @KevinSimler @The_Lagrangian @sonyaellenmann Wow this is really fascinating. I tried imagining being a lion eating something and seeing that haka, and I was very much like "fuck this shit I'm out".
@dailectic @KevinSimler @The_Lagrangian @sonyaellenmann Also there's evidence that singing as a group activity evolved before denotative language, which this whole thing dovetails well with! (Not sure of original source; I got it from Iain McGilchrist's 💯 book The Master and his Emissary)
@Conaw So much resonance with this. Part of what reinforces this commitment to forcing oneself is that the whole thing is a battle between an inner "goodself" & "badself". Both maintain their need to exist on the basis of the other. More on that in this book 👇
Retweeted @Conaw
Related: many (past self included) believe deep down that forcing themselves to do things through "willpower" is something they…
@Conaw Internal conflict has been a major topic for me for a couple of years. Here's various tweets of mine about it: twitter.com/search?q=from%…
@kevinakwok Another weird hypothesis: visualizing abstract things like a red star is (unexpectedly!?) harder for people with medium visualization ability than visualizing whole scenes.
Excellent article about little 1-person experiments to test phenomenogical processes for things like counting seconds.
@kevinakwok Like there's a gestalt sense and the sense is lighting up a lot of your visual system without any particular thing within it being particularly distinct or detailed.
@kevinakwok Test idea for distinguishing between visualization & spatialization! Consider the scene in front of you. Close your eyes. Imagine that scene. Turn around (eyes still closed). Is it harder or easier to imagine that original scene? (/ more or less detailed)
@kevinakwok I'm not sure exactly what's going on here, but for me it was harder and I suspect that's because my sense of what's present is mediated by the sense that while my eyes are closed I could reach out and touch it all. I guess I should test while standing in a more open area...
Listening to the playlist generated by my Likes and really digging a song, which would ordinarily cause me to Like it but... it's already Liked. And I'm sad but I'm like "well I guess that makes sense as a technical limitation" but... wait. Why _not_ allow boosting song-Like?
To be clear, I don't necessarily mean that boosting that Like would affect anything outside of a personal count, but external could be neat too especially if you could only Like once/day or once/listen. 🤔 (Song was this remix by @JenauxMusic) soundcloud.com/jenaux/the-cha…
Replying to @DrZoePounder
@pounderz A bunch of us have been having an interesting thread about aphantasia and distinguishing between mental pictures and mental shapes over here:
@paraschopra @sia_steel Relatedly, some people don't have inner monologue at all! (Pretty interesting article if you click through)
the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing 🤙 because the left hemisphere doesn't trust the right hemisphere.🧠
@meditationstuff @vgr @lou_keep What of this 73-tweet storm is purely a summary of @lou_keep's article, and what is further commentary by Mark? (This tweetstorm blew my mind so I'm probably gonna just go read the original anyway, but I figured it would be worth voicing this question.)
@meditationstuff @vgr @lou_keep Oh, I'm realizing that this thread isn't a summarization attempt at all, but an elaboration, so except for tweets that explicitly reference @lou_keep, it's all Mark? And that here's Mark's actual attempted summary:
@nolangray_ @vgr I'm laughcrying.
I can't overstate the importance of what Mark is talking about in this thread. Having read it, I'm feeling this huge mix of love, grief, & passionate drive.
@meditationstuff @vgr summarized this very powerfully with the concept of Fourth Worlds: "The lament that the United States is turning into a third-world country is at once too pessimistic and too optimistic." ribbonfarm.com/2019/04/08/wei…
@visakanv @QiaochuYuan @kevinakwok @KevinSimler @backus @nayafia I think the core question is maybe "are you holding in awareness the parts of it that can't be seen from a given angle?" but maybe people mostly don't actually even know what can be seen from a given angle... meaningness.com/understanding
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @Conaw @QiaochuYuan @uncatherio @visakanv @visakanv
@Conaw @QiaochuYuan @uncatherio @visakanv This raises the really interesting question of "if someone were trying to build a #TwitterReplacement that was made for this new thing, would it be best to do it now while the number of people using it in this new way is small enough?"
@visakanv Speaking of essays, one I wrote awhile ago talking about some related stuff: malcolmocean.com/2016/06/you-fl…
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
Have a friend who puts it this way: happiness is what you feel when you're getting what you want. So wanting to feel happy…
@garybasin @QiaochuYuan One variant I like is "success is getting what you want and happiness is wanting what you get" (Still doesn't answer define want!)
Thread · Perceptual control theory, wanting, and internal conflict · 9 of 10 tweets
@garybasin @QiaochuYuan More generally, discussion of "want" is aided enormously by a general understanding of Perceptual Control Theory: that people are moving around closing various gaps between some reference level & some perceived level of something: Too cold → put on sweater. Lonely → tinder.
@garybasin @QiaochuYuan There's a whole hierarchical network of these control systems (think thermostats). Tinder mightn't solve your loneliness, but as long as it feels like it might and you don't feel safe experimenting with something else, you'll do it. Fail long enough, reorganization occurs.
@garybasin @QiaochuYuan Reorganization means trying a different strategy, on some level of abstraction. Abandoning some lower-level goal and trying something else in service of the same higher level goal. Or maybe the goal in question is abandoned: "maybe I'm just doomed to be lonely"
@garybasin @QiaochuYuan Although we all have a few core thermostats that are very hard to reset or abandon indefinitely: food, thirst, pain, connection, meaning. So eventually the person who has resigned themselves to loneliness usually tries something new, and can't help it even though fearing hope.
@garybasin @QiaochuYuan PCT clearly clearly answers the question of "why are some things easier to do than not do?" ...that @fortelabs asked for examples of awhile ago:
@garybasin @QiaochuYuan @fortelabs What uses negative effort is doing whatever seems like it will achieve all of your goals (in PCT terms "close all the errors between your reference levels & perceptions"). However, most ppl are traumatized bundles of conflicting goals & strategies. So there exists no such path.
@garybasin @QiaochuYuan @fortelabs Therefore all of life becomes strenuous, even fun things. ("I should be studying/writing/working/exercising/sleeping!") Speaking of tensions between fun, studying/writing, and sleeping... I wrote an article describing an impossible bind of those: malcolmocean.com/2014/09/viciou…
@garybasin @QiaochuYuan @fortelabs I think that when people think they're pursuing happiness, what they actually mean is "I WANT OUT" from the endless internal conflict where nothing they do satisfies all of their strategies. twitter.com/RealtimeAI/sta…
@garybasin @QiaochuYuan @fortelabs And @dthorson has described MAPLE's awakening training as being able to produce "sustainable happiness, regardless of circumstances" (from memory) The idea that this is impossible comes from confusing happiness with success:
...thinking that "rhizome" would make a cool name for the #TwitterReplacement concept I've been thinking about but it's terrible onomastically bc it's hard to spell & not unique. Then realized @Conaw's related project Roam is part of a phonetic anagram of Rhizome: Eyes Roam👁👁
(Aside: phonetic anagram seems like a cool concept. I think the closest term is a spoonerism (which Rhizome: Eyes Roam structurally is) but there's cool stuff to be found elsewhere here. Repurpose the phonemes but don't worry about the letters. Translate to IPA then anagram?)
Yep, checks out: rhizome = raɪzoʊm eyes roam = aɪz roʊm (different in a British accent; not sure if it still works bc can't find IPA for "rhizome" in British accent. eyes roam becomes "aɪz rəʊm")
Thread · Perceptual control theory, wanting, and internal conflict · 1 of 10 tweets
@garybasin @QiaochuYuan @fortelabs @dthorson Although I think that the actual desired state isn't best called success NOR happiness but something more like "flow" or "wu wei": = acting in each moment in a way that makes deep sense to an integrated whole of one's desires and big-picture purpose.
@garybasin @Conaw Nah tha's the most important part of this thread 🙃 There's two parts of network effects. One way to bootstrap getting any traction at all is to interlink tightly with actual-Twitter at the start. The app would xpost to twitter Then there's how to grow huge. And I'd rather not!
@garybasin @Conaw This would therefore not be able to replace the value of twitter as a way to interact with THE WHOLE FREAKING WORLD ALL AT ONCE... ...but it would be 10-100× better for having discussions among dozens of interested-&-interesting people, and exploring ideas.
@garybasin @Conaw I would do it with a paid subscription, so that user interests & biz interests are aligned. Could have a long trial though or use quadratic pricing up to a point, to gain initial critical mass. & growth via limited invite, so network of "ppl I want to talk to"
@meditationstuff @lou_keep I think main issue was just that you started with @vgr's call for summaries, so for people who didn't know that you'd already written one it seemed like this was your entry. If your 1st/2nd tweet had "that article inspired some further thoughts..." then it would have felt clear!
@ben_r_hoffman @meditationstuff Ditto to everything Ben says here. (I'm actively working on this coordination / group-awakening thing.)
@reasonisfun @meditationstuff *pokes placeholder to see if it will turn into longer reply* (I searched "poke" in gifs and a quarter were pokemon. this gif also suits this tweet🤷)
@reasonisfun @meditationstuff There's a key difference that I see between a few clusters of perspectives. Lulie & DDeutsch are in one, and myself & Mark (I think) are in another. 1st says "there has been societal progress! things are improving!" 2nd says "yes, AND also other things are FUBAR"
@reasonisfun @meditationstuff One way I think about this is that Deutsch's model of static & dynamic societies says nothing about the transition phase, which is a third whole thing altogether.
@reasonisfun @meditationstuff (I want to underscore: I love DD's model. I also find it dangerously incomplete because it could lead people to thinking that just because we're no longer in a static society we'll necessarily be able to solve all of our problems. We aren't truly in a dynamic society yet either!)
@MarcoPoloApp Loving your app! I'd like to request: when it comes time, can you please please monetize with subscription fees, not ads? Me paying you means we're on the same team—I don't want the app to become corrupted by advertising incentives.♥
Retweeted @robinhanson
Wow, this is a seriously sad result, well worth trying to understand deeply. twitter.com/PTetlock/statu…
Me right now: fixing a @CompliceGoals bug preventing reviews from saving so that I can do my weekly review before midnight and not upset @bmndr! 🤣
@ben_r_hoffman .......yeah. 😢
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@cognazor @KeenDisregard In complex systems (including interpersonal relations, intergovernmental relations, and biology…
Replying to @cosimia_
@cosimia_ One of my new favorite phrases: "perhaps-inevitable". Allows considering certainty within a container of uncertainty.
@alifeofmovement Ooh I'm going to pick up The Music Lesson because there's definitely a music↔spirit connection for me.
Retweeted @ben_r_hoffman
@Malcolm_Ocean This is a huge opportunity, though - people are already as silly as this model predicts, but the more of…
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@garybasin @QiaochuYuan @fortelabs I think that when people think they're pursuing happiness, what they actually mean is…
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @garybasin @QiaochuYuan @fortelabs Yeah, the words we choose matter though. A difference feels different as a "lack" versus an "opportunity". Eg @ben_r_hoffman pointed out a stuckness and I responded with a 😢 and he said:
@context_ing @garybasin @QiaochuYuan @fortelabs @ben_r_hoffman Relevant to this whole thing is Robert Fritz's concepts of Oscillating Tension & Creative Tension, but I'm not sure where a good intro is. At a glance, this article seems decent and can be read as a basic application of the PCT model I described above. productiveflourishing.com/a-users-guide-…
@alifeofmovement Derp, maybe would have been worth holding off on ordering the physical book until I'd seen this tweet from you :P Anyway, apparently they're offering me another audible trial since I haven't used it in so long, so that works!
Not really sure what we learned from this. (Click through for a thread about aphantasia)
Thread · Spatialization: imagining shapes instead of images · 1 of 7 tweets
@kevinakwok @KevinSimler @backus @nayafia Tagging the aphantasics in the thread to see if any answered "sculpture", because that would be meaningful I suppose! @kevinakwok @backus @KevinSimler
@QiaochuYuan @garybasin Yeah ppl's internal conflicts make "revealed preference" not a very meaningful term. May help predict their behavior, but not a preference because no part of them actually prefers that behv. Like how a political compromise can be a plan everyone hates.🙄
@SamoBurja Practical suggestion: have you tried recommending eg "check out the postscript on the second edition of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" Specificity makes suggestion shorter & novel, and suggests arcane knowledge. (Then maybe they look at the rest of book after!)
@thewiseturtle @speakerjohnash Don't forget the role that inhibition plays in the brain, on basic neuron levels and higher levels. Some people express unseen musical talents after a stroke, suggesting the structure was there the whole time but not allowed to be used.
@ben_r_hoffman @context_ing @garybasin @QiaochuYuan @fortelabs Mmmm yeah. Feeling a sense of relief/release with this remark. That's the thing, being able to hold things that have opposite valence without experiencing them as contradicting.
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@ben_r_hoffman @context_ing @garybasin @QiaochuYuan @fortelabs Mmmm yeah. Feeling a sense of relief/release with this re…
Was thinking about "yes, and" then imagined a Yes-And Camp and then got the phrase "this one time at Yes-And Camp..." ...and now I'm imagining an improv game that's just collaborative story-telling and starts that way. Everyone reminiscing a complete fiction together.
If you want to play this game on twitter, make a new tweet quoting this tweet and then starting with "This one time at #YesAndCamp..." Then embed that tweet in *this* thread if you want others to find/join your stories!
(Let's keep this thread *about* the concept, and if you want to play the game, go over here👇)
This one time, at #YesAndCamp, I was rolling down a hill with @alifeofmovement, and we were going so fast!
Here's an inaugural one to start! I tagged Wes because he'd mentioned Impro the other day.
@QiaochuYuan @mattgoldenberg @sulphuroxide Huh weird. The idea of neverending oneness & bliss sounds super boring to me. I feel like these people actually want this below thing and aren't creative enough to imagine how it could be interesting. (Not suggesting that my "I feel like" is correct)
@QiaochuYuan @mattgoldenberg @sulphuroxide ...now I find myself wondering if the crux of this difference might be "emptiness" vs "beyond emptiness" that @Meaningness points at in this vivid post... vividness.live/2013/12/12/emp…
Replying to @benlandautaylor
@benlandautaylor Oddly, Canada has a bunch of this weirdness too (inherited from USA?) Eg like most Ontarians, I have an OHIP card (Ontario Health Insurance Plan) which I present to the doctor for routine card, not just emergencies. Then I need private insurance to cover routine eye/dental.
@benlandautaylor I think that the last thing sort of makes sense due to human irrationalities: There's sort of a short-term incentive to get private insurance because it takes the sting out of eye/dental care, without having to do think about major actual emergencies.
@benlandautaylor And yet I haven't gone to the dentist in awhile, because I'm meaning to sign up for private insurance again and haven't gotten around to it. If I'd known it would have taken me this long to sign up for private insurance, I'd have gone to the dentist already. But that's... 🤷
@SarahAMcManus @QiaochuYuan @mattgoldenberg @sulphuroxide @algekalipso Yessss, love this. This graphic basically sums it up: (Also... somehow Spiritual Euphoria can expand to contain grief and anger and all sorts of other messy/dark things? Relatedly, Spectrum of Ecstasy which Qiaochu recommended to us arrived, & I am enjoying it immensely!)
@fortelabs Following this thread. (My specific want is for something slightly different: 2-4 lav mics that can all pair with the same phone at the same time, allowing high-Q recordings of conversation in a noisy café)
@fortelabs Hmm, seems this is basically the right thing for my situation... amazon doesn't sell the kits but sells the parts, and... does have an option for a pure-audio dual input (not just the lightning one) rode.com/microphones/sc…
@fortelabs Aha! Just found this kit, which is way less pricy. Ordered it. We'll see what the quality's like—hard to imagine it can be worse than our current situation of just using the phone mic. (It's not bluetooth though, which'll be at least little annoying.) amazon.com/Professional-M…
@coachnateb Tagging @reasonisfun, who was raised in a context that was aimed at being such a thing, and is now theorizing about it.
@alifeofmovement Yes, and then @Conaw jumped out of the fractal catacombs—from 2.7095 places at once! ...which was rather startling.
@fortelabs Will do! Guessing for your situation that spending the $500 or whatever on the RODE system I linked above will be worth it for whatever reason, but if this set-up is just 💯 then I'll let you know :)
Thread · Spectrum of Ecstasy and McGilchrist's hemisphere model · 7 of 8 tweets
1/ Reading Spectrum of Ecstasy (thanks @QiaochuYuan & @Meaningness!) ...and the parallels between it and Iain McGilchrist's @divided_brain model are... like 100%? If it weren't for the fact that IM doesn't use the term "non-dual", these pages could literally from IM's book.
2/ Given my understanding that @Meaningness's work is based largely on what Spectrum of Ecstasy is talking about, I now want to amplify this tweet like 30×.
3/ He replied and noted that he had read some summaries, but if you're someone out there who has appreciated meaningness.com or vividness.live, you almost certainly want to check out The Master and his Emissary!
4/ Here's a link to The Master and his Emissary on Amazon: amzn.to/2JFiHYc
5/ It has been blowing my mind with its capacity to explain, to my left hemisphere, *that it is a left hemisphere*. And that it has a RHem partner that's MADE to handle unknowns and uncertainties and paradoxes and improvising, so my LHem doesn't HAVE to.
6/ This realization has been critical, for me, for teaching my LHem that if it lets go, everything doesn't disintegrate. I lose my (illusion of) perfect control, but I don't become powerless. So I feel safer letting go. Which is key because
7/ I don't grok enough about the brain or about tantric non-dual awareness to have a precise model for how they relate, but I feel like we're on the cusp of this and I'm really excited about that.
Retweeted @CarlZha
Automated grape 🍇 feeding twitter.com/xChina4/status…
@TheAnnaGat Huh, I resonate a lot with most of the things and am at least neutral on the others... ...and I can't help but think: how are you going to actually find clusters of people if you put all of your polling questions separately!?
@ben_r_hoffman Hmm, based on a lot of inexplicit stuff I'm aware of, I'm pretty sure it's not a scam. That said, the tone of that particular article rubs my hair a little backward. I resonate with all of the dimensions, so maybe it just feels prematurely reified? Nah, that's not quite it...
@ben_r_hoffman I've had an implicit sense of there being a sort of cluster on Twitter I've been connecting with for the last year or two, but I'd been thinking about it primarily in terms of meta-rationalist / meta-modernist. Seems that's a different but overlapping cluster!
@ben_r_hoffman Relatedly, @dthorson said on an emerge episode some months ago (maybe with @peternlimberg?) there's this sense of something that isn't doing tribalism, but is a cluster. And they talked about the idea of the term "fellowship" for it, or something.
@ben_r_hoffman A big part of my weird feeling while reading it was from the polls. They're all separate questions, so they shine no light on whether there are distinct clusters in the space, and they ask "is X important in our community?" which I only know inasmuch as I've a sense of the whole.
@ben_r_hoffman Mmmm, yeah, that resonates. And as you said, the Medium muddles the message.
@ben_r_hoffman In a sense he was & in a sense he did, and this ∥ thing might head somewhere similar. When I stare at this post and imagine a few years in the future, some outcomes are similar to the Bay Area Rationality situation (which brings up all sorts of feels 😄😐🤓😤👽😣😜😟😍😢🤔)
@ben_r_hoffman Obvi it would be way different for dozens of reasons. And I already see within this new thing (whatever it is) a cluster of very purpose-driven people and a cluster of people mostly attracted to it as a social thing. Not a problem, *and* can produce tension around group identity.
@ben_r_hoffman Okay, after reflecting on this for an entire half-hour, I have a conclusive conclusion! 😉 It's not that it was prematurely reified, it's that I really really really don't like the term chosen. I think it's fairly likely that the term chosen will create a terrible attractor.
@ben_r_hoffman The attractor is definitely not what I want, & I'm pretty sure it's not the attractor that the people at the center of the cluster want either. If I didn't care I could just let it do its thing. But I'm within the gravitational pull of this nascent attractor, so I'm like fuckkk
@uncatherio @ben_r_hoffman Yes yes yes yes yes this.
See also this tweet with some excerpts from McGilchrist's book about the relationship of language and meaning:
Tweet-thread for an introduction to Iain McGilchrist's @divided_brain model about the profound difference between how each hemisphere attends to the world! (Note: there's lots of bs about 🧠 hemispheres; this new model seems pretty solid and better than a naive idk🤷 model)
Thread · Meta-thread of threads on McGilchrist's brain hemispheres · 8 of 38 tweets
Meta-thread of various threads (mostly mine) about Iain McGilchrist's brain hemisphere model!
(Note: there's lots of myths & bs about the brain hemispheres, but this new model seems pretty solid and better than a naive model that just says "all we know is that these functions are on the left and these are on the right")
Here's a thread that's deliberately designed to be a general summary & introduction:
Here's my first, where I intro'd the concept briefly and noted that a bunch of learning challenges get confusing because we try to teach our left hemisphere how to do things our right hemisphere already knows. Instead, LH needs to learn to let RH work.
McGilchrist's model helped me understand why I have often tended to feel anger instead of grief, even though it feels better to feel the grief.
@jonnym1ller posted a highlighted version of my 2017 ribbonfarm article about not-just-asking questions, which prompted me to reflect on the relationship between questions and the brain hemispheres
Here's a few tweets in response to @fortelabs saying that various things aren't things. There are no things!
A short thread about language:
@ben_r_hoffman Am working on multiple tweetstorms to talk about it 🙃
The thing that we're working on is fractal — you don't need to be tackling the whole world to be tackling the whole thing.
Replying to @innerstitial
@QiaochuYuan @Meaningness @divided_brain Yeah! I also really enjoyed making this thread. 7 dense tweets that all embed some sort of other content (image, tweet, link, etc) And I'm excited to refer back to them later, although as multilayer tweets they may be harder to embed.
Retweeted @Conaw
Open Question: Why are there not large dependency graphs of the open questions in major scientific fields? The tech tree in Civ…
@Conaw Yeah it seems like this would also help point people at Hamming Problems. It could include not just interdependencies but also what real-world impact various discoveries would have! cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAnd…
@Conaw Also yesterday I discovered there's a startlingly clear & important relationship between tantric enlightenment & brain hemispheres. 🤯 I'm surely not the first to sense this, but the impact of these models connecting has barely been felt yet at *all*.
@Conaw This is relevant because I think some of most fascinating interdependencies in this tree aren't known until solved. In this case: Psychiatrist spends 20 years aggregating schizophrenic & stroke cases, & studies of birds; result helps people realize non-dual awareness. What.
Thread · Meta-thread of threads on McGilchrist's brain hemispheres · 1 of 38 tweets
Oh and of course this one today that basically concludes that tantric non-dual awareness enlightenment is basically synonymous with getting your left hemisphere to let your right hemisphere run the show.
@webdevMason On the subject of how to feel good about your reading without worrying about finishing books:
Thread · Why naming that community "inter-intellect" worries me
I read this piece by @TheAnnaGat on the #InterIntellect/@whatstheii and have thoughts & feelings on the subject, that I want to share!
Summary: Anna has identified a cluster of people constellating online around some similar themes, broadly: - weird, curious & openminded - kind & postpartisan - self-directed doers - well-rounded - non-judgmental - big picture thinkers - age-agnostic - want connection & community
She calls it the "inter-intellect". Here's another take:
I am definitely in this cluster! And I've been noticing the cluster as it's been appearing, from my perspective. A small part of me feels excited that this is being pointed at more clearly, so that people can connect around it! twitter.com/ManuelDAnda/st…
And... a lot of me feels sad/scared. Took me a bit of introspection and poking around more to figure out why! There are a few subtle reasons related to confusion around why the article was constructed how it was, particularly things about the polls, and that's part of it.
The deeper thing for me with this #InterIntellect thing is that I think the name that has been chosen is likely to create a rallying flag that sooner or later becomes an attractor that's not what we want! 😨
I've written about how when naming nuanced things, it's important to chose terms that people won't think they already understand, and that won't distort attempts to further clarify the concept. malcolmocean.com/2016/02/sparkl…
And my sense is that the associations with the term "intellect" are sufficiently far from the central core engine of what connects these people, that it'll lead us astray if we try to rally around it. Might take a few years, but this sort of thing happens—by default, not rarely.
I shared these pages earlier today, which begin "This is not to say that there is no place for intellect — it is a valuable capacity ... the problem with intellect is that we use it to distract ourselves from direct experience ... to judge perception as good, bad, or indifferent"
The context I shared that in earlier is in a thread about the right & left hemispheres, as understood through Iain McGilchrist's new model. Anna's blog post about inter-intellect mentions integrating both hemispheres, but the term "intellect" maps very directly onto the left🧠
(If you haven't seen my earlier tweets on this, I'm not talking about the hypey personality-typey hemispheres models from 60s split-brain experiments. McGilchrist has done a ton of research and has a new model based on how each hemisphere attends.) Intro: metalearn.net/podcasts/ml41-…
^ that podcast is a fantastic intro to the topic in under 45 minutes. I'm planning to do some sort of write-up of it, but that hasn't happened yet. When I do it'll be here:
Anyway, while Anna and others might not mean so narrow a thing by "intellect", my concern is the connotation might be strong enough that it creates an attractor for the (many!) ppl who are committed to an intellect-only mode-of-being, even if initial #InterIntellect folks aren't!
So those are some thoughts on the semantic aspects of why the term "inter-intellect" feels off to me. (The "inter" part is great. Everything is deeply intertwingled.) As I thought about this more I noticed there are also syntactical reasons I find the term weird.
Anna uses the term as... a singular noun > "Why you probably belong to an inter-intellect and why this matters" This suggests that I.I. is the name for the community, not someone in it... who is, I guess, an "inter-intellectual"? 🤨
Yet indefinite article "an" suggests that there could be dozens or hundreds of inter-intellects out there. As if it means "a group of people who connect on the internet out of shared (meta)interests." But then "The I.I." (eg @whatstheii) uses "the", implying there's just one!
@yashkaf's comment on the original post illustrates this very confusion: (And probably we need terms for both of these things! The rationality community represents a relatively successful precursor to what Anna & other ii folks are trying to do here!) medium.com/@yashkaf/my-li…
Whew, feels good to write that all out. Again, I love the *referent* that Anna is pointing at here. It's me! It's my people! 🥰 (I'm not at the middle of this cluster but I am in it) I wrote this whole tweetstorm because I'm hoping for a different signifier.
...and I don't have an alternate name idea.🙃 In my head, I've been thinking of this cluster as being kind of meta-rational / meta-modern, but I'm guessing that those terms are somehow simultaneously too broad & too narrow for what Anna's pointing at (in different dimensions)
Might as well collect some information from everyone who's reading this. This is obviously going to be oversimplified but go with your gut answer to both: Are you in this #InterIntellect cluster & what's your sense of that name?
And of course reply and lmk what your thoughts are on the name, on the cluster, the relationship between them, alternatives, meta-commentary...
@Conaw @QiaochuYuan @uncatherio @visakanv Oh god yeah. I just don't tweet from mobile at all lol. Needs way better draft save too. I didn't lose anything today, but at one point was working on two tweetstorms each with 10+ tweets, and was copying the text to sublime to ensure it wasn't lost if my browser froze.
@ben_r_hoffman Gave up on trying to finish my McGilchrist intro tweetstorm today (which I was going to link in the one below), but here's the centrally relevant one:
@Conaw @QiaochuYuan @uncatherio @visakanv Another layer to this question: to what extent are the people using this "new app" part of this cluster? (If that were largely true, it would make a perfect starting population!)
For a long time, one of the most aggravating things for me has been poor designed. Unfortunately this is almost everything. Today I used an interface and exclaimed "It's so bad!" and just laughed. 🤣 (here's a 2014 post about my learning on this) bit.ly/2VFkZhl
@aaronzlewis @peternlimberg @Meaningness Related, the idea that "meta" is necessarily missing the point. Sometimes it is! But also injunctions against meta are sometimes how existing power structures are maintained: (click through 👇 to see this tweet in context & some pages about double-binds)
@Conaw What matters is on a different level of abstraction. "Compromise as toxic" can be an okay heuristic but the important questions are more like: 1) do you have a positive-sum & positively correlated game? 2) is there any building feeling of resent or contempt?
@Conaw This app, @Golden implies it would do this: "Mapping leading edges of knowledge — from the quark to the jaguar" ("leading edge" implies that it contains a bunch of unknowns & questions; I realize that Golden may not do this, but it would be good!) golden.com/blog/introduci…
Replying to @innerstitial
@AndJohnsonAnd I suggest making sure that at the very least you've decided exactly what you're going to work on today/next before diving in. That in itself is a start, & the clarity means the decision is "this thing" vs "game" (not "work" vs "game"). Sometimes "this thing" is more interesting!
@Pavox @maxweisel @philletourneau @Skrillex Could add another filter based on amount of teeth showing, and another based on sticking your tongue out!
"What we cannot manipulate, we ignore." Another great quote from Spectrum of Ecstasy, which again resonates so clearly with Iain McGilchrist's @divided_brain model.
Retweeted @webdevMason
Speaking for myself, here: I felt like if I could be smart enough to think something new and important, I could be loved f…
Retweeted @julianweisser
These are the sort of fascinating Hacker News comments that make it all worthwhile. Successful playground designer ("hi…
Retweeted @jessi_cata
It can simultaneously be unethical to take some action X, and unethical to force others not to do X. Coercion has addition…
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing I wrote a blog post about this a few years ago! malcolmocean.com/2017/04/beyond…
@context_ing It talks about post-mortems and it just occurred to me that this article I recently read on "blameless post-mortems" also focuses on revealing "what did I do? what did I notice?" versus "what should the other person have done" codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/bla…
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@context_ing It talks about post-mortems and it just occurred to me that this article I recently read on "blameless post…
@mrgunn @aaronzlewis @visakanv @ribbonfarm @EpsilonTheory @paulgb For a year I've been collecting ideas about the possibility of building something that incorporates views like treeverse and also lets you actually compose tweets. Search #TwitterReplacement for my thoughts, & check out this early thread about it.
Retweeted @keithwalkiewicz
@garybasin Cultures only progress forward, building on top of what has already been established. The exception is duri…
Thread · Earning wealth in the context of society and infrastructure · 14 of 15 tweets
1/ "You Might Have Earned It, But Don’t Forget That Your Wealth Came from Society" Subtitle: To be human is to earn the right to share in the wealth generated by productive social institutions Thread 👇 evonomics.com/wealth-of-huma…
2/ This article helped me make sense of some internal confusion around what it means to have earned something. To me, it points at a beautiful way of thinking, beyond capitalism & communism (as ideologies) that recognizes the intertwingled nature of human life.
3/ Most of that came from this paragraph: Even if you make your money, however much, from your own enterprising, that necessitates a context to support that enterprise, including infrastructure (private or public) to feed & house a population to buy your products.
4/ I think about this myself, as the solo founder of an app (complice.co) that now basically runs itself and pays for me to work on whatever I want to:
5/ @CompliceGoals has created & continues to create lots of value in the world, & I managed to get it set up so I "capture" enough of that value to live on. Did I do it myself? In one sense yes. But I couldn't have done it without all of the existing technology I'm building on.
6/ I haven't made a Wardley Map for Complice but if I did it would include @Heroku, @Stripe, @MongoDB, @Angular, @NodeJS, #WebRTC & dozens of other programming modules. (and of course the entire electricity, computer, & internet platforms)
7/ The Complice philosophy could have been implemented a century ago, mostly on paper. And basically has been! Lots of goal-based planner notebooks. But I couldn't have "single-handedly" created this app and this business even a decade ago!
8/ Sometimes we have the crazy idea that we can create wealth out of nothing, but (like everything) it always exists in context. twitter.com/Austen/status/…
9/ This applies at all scales—to me, & to Bill Gates. What is possible is a function of context. Sometimes this is exciting: those I tagged above are all stoked I'm using their tech for my app—that's what it's for! 🚀💞 Other times... 😢
10/ Wealth is a kind of negentropy, & since entropy can't be destroyed, to create wealth I either need to dump my entropy elsewhere or get negentropy input. Part of the context of a lot of wealth creation has been by externalizing costs, onto other individuals or the context.
11/ "There is no away" is a slogan that's been used around environmentalism, instructing people to not throw things away, but it applies much more broadly. I can pretend, I can hide, but ultimately I am inalienably part of the system I am sending your externalities into.
12/ To be clear, this doesn't mean I should feel guilty. Guilt is a resource you can only play zero-sum or negative-sum games with, so as this thread talks about, it doesn't allow us to make more possible!
13/ On the contrary, if I think I should feel guilty about something, I'm ever the more likely to hide & pretend and not think about it! Or get defensive if I do. I need a stance beyond blame, that will allow me to be aware without getting defensive. codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/bla…
14/ One tool for staying out of blame: consciously reframe either/or thinking into both/and thinking. I earned my wealth AND I couldn't have done it alone. I care about myself AND I care about others. People are suffering AND people are in ecstatic flow.
Retweeted @Conaw
Twitter as a company is culturally oriented around NOW. Product reflects this. The Twitter users who search their own and other…
Thread · Tweets as timestamped thoughts and a renounce button
@Conaw @ultimape @GRITCULT @visakanv @KevinSimler @vgr @context_ing One thing I'm unsure of, in all of this, is the role of time. Another platform will be less NOW-oriented, but I think that part of what I like is that Twitter (more than blogging) makes it really clear that this tweet is a thought I'm having *at this point in time*
@Conaw @ultimape @GRITCULT @visakanv @KevinSimler @vgr @context_ing If I make a tweetstorm about something, it doesn't have to be the be-all-end-all reference for a topic, it's just "what I thought about this at this time". Lends itself to unpolished writing & thus thinking-together rather than me-telling-you.
@Conaw @ultimape @GRITCULT @visakanv @KevinSimler @vgr @context_ing Visa has written about forgetting he wrote something—this is the nature of writing! And sometimes rediscovering it is like "wow!"
@Conaw @ultimape @GRITCULT @visakanv @KevinSimler @vgr @context_ing And sometimes rediscovering it is like 🤦. Like reading your old OKC answers and being like "I used to be a ______ist??" Someone (can't find source) was suggesting no edit button (edit is doom) but an ability to renounce an old tweet, which makes a lot of sense to me!
@Conaw @ultimape @GRITCULT @visakanv @KevinSimler @vgr @context_ing Edit is doom because it means tweets lose their temporality, and makes it easier to become perfectionistic. But having renounce gives an option instead of delete—supporting the idea that it's okay to learn and the past isn't shameful. Would require cultural differences too ofc!
@Conaw @ultimape @GRITCULT @visakanv @KevinSimler @vgr @context_ing (To be clear, "renounce" is prrrrooobably the wrong name for this feature 😉 And probably it would make sense to have an option to point any viewers of that tweet at a new one that clarifies.)
Thread · Why the Twitter Intellectual Internet excites me: co-creation and intertwinglement
1/ I'm reflecting on this tweetstorm I wrote a couple days ago and noticing that while I still stand by the content that's in there (and many people resonate with it) it was incomplete: It gave only one sentence to why I'm excited about the thing!
2/ So I'm intentionally writing a second thread about I.I. 👁👁 Too late to do "create before you critique" because I already critiqued, but never too late to create! twitter.com/cosimia_/statu…
3/ I made a conscious decision in 2017 to get back on Twitter, inspired by a sense I had that if I tweaked my online behavior slightly, I could build all sorts of relationships with amazing people! And that has worked 🥰 (and we're just getting started)
4/ Give your self-reflection a little twist and beautiful things can emerge! (playing with this app, Fraksyl, and noticing how tiny changes were amplified into beautiful patterns, was actually part of the inspiration for my decision to get back on Twitter)
5/ Since I'd had a twitter account through a half-dozen different life phases, this meant a lot of unfollowing (like 700). (The app manageflitter.com is helpful for this)
6/ What Anna's post about @whatstheii made clear to me is that this isn't just me! I had already had a vague sense that a lot of the people I followed were following each other, but now a much larger sense of context around that.
7/ The "this isn't just me" doesn't just mean "I'm not alone". It also means "I can't take credit for how beautiful my corner of twitter is" Obviously—I don't write all of the tweets. Less obviously—my curation is part of a context of other people also curating.
8/ The quality of my conversations with people on twitter is affected by their mood, which is affected by who else they're talking with on twitter, and how.
9/ This intertwinglement is both obviously true, and remarkably easy to ignore.
10/ I wrote a whole tweetstorm about this concept just now so I could share it in this tweetstorm about the I.I. thing:
11/ It's a fractal! I love how the structure of twitter inspires me to write this stuff up and pull it all together! I've barely blogged in a year but this context naturally makes me prolific!
12/ So what I'm most excited about regarding the I.I. is the co-creation that is happening. Which is currently including the co-creation of relationships, identity, community. I'm looking forward to participating in that in whatever forms emerge for it—URL & IRL.
13/ @Conaw remarked that this new culture on twitter feels like "a new app, and max 10,000 people are using it." I asked:
14/ My sense is that the overlap between those 10k people and the I.I. isn't total but is large—might be the perfect critical mass for this #TwitterReplacement concept I keep talking about.
15/ It's not making sense for me to work on that full-time right now but I would love to play a strategy/design role to a #TwitterReplacement project that I resonate with. I've got a year's worth of notes on how I might approach it!
If carbon capture tech is so primitive, how are carbon offsets so cheap?
Replying to @danielharan
@danielharan Gotcha, so basically buying one person's worth of carbon offsets is cheap, but buying a whole country's worth is impossible? I sort of figured it was something like this... demand for "carbon offsets" as a product is low, so there's marginal stuff, but it's not denting...
@danielharan Interestingly, this sort of suggests that if I wanted to spend $5000 on offsetting carbon, it might be higher impact to give it to a group that is researching new tech and needs a bit of cash to make it through some round of funding (grant or investment)
Replying to @joyurge
@gmws82 @visakanv @Conaw I scroll through my timeline and it's so well-curated that within like 5 minutes I have way too many tabs open to respond to today. I use tabsnooze to make them come back in the future. I'm not saying this is a *good* workflow but it's my workflow atm!
@gmws82 @visakanv @Conaw I've often done direct replies rather than quote replies, because I don't want to run off with the conversation, but this has the unfortunate effect of making my thoughts hard to follow when the OP replies to me. See this thread about a time that happened:
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @vidythatte @aaronzlewis @Conaw @visakanv Ooh, this is interesting and reminds me of my Captain's Log concept. It's like a journal but timestamped to the minute and used for (among other things) making decisions. I sometimes call it "interactive reflection" (vs "retrospective reflection")
@Conaw @gmws82 @visakanv @ultimape @GRITCULT @KevinSimler @vgr @context_ing I do this with a custom Chrome (Brave actually) search engine. - tw searches twitter - twm searches twitter with from:malcolm_ocean pre-typed - twv searches twitter with from:visakanv (just added that last one but have been meaning to for awhile)
@Conaw @gmws82 @visakanv @ultimape @GRITCULT @KevinSimler @vgr @context_ing Here's what the individual item looks like. %s in place of search query:
@_awbery_ @_TamaraWinter Book where an author takes 11 strolls around the same neighborhood in Manhattan, each time with different company, and observes what world they see as they walk with her: amzn.to/2JPNh1B
Retweeted @DavidJuurlink
I'd like to share some reflections on the death of a patient. I’ve thought about her a lot. She gave me explicit consen…
@callumflack @KaseyKlimes everything is threads
Yes I'm changing can't stop it now even if I wanted I wouldn't know how
@QiaochuYuan @aaronzlewis @visakanv @TheAnnaGat Iain McGilchrist's book, The Master and his Emissary, talks extensively about the evolution of people's relationship with poetry through the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romantic periods, and how it got distorted due to fear of anything not explicit.
@rauchs @generativist Yep, very relevant. Someone made an app awhile ago called FeedHero (now defunct) that gave you access to twitter threads as if they were each chats, and you could archive them. This is one thing I'd want to include in my #TwitterReplacement concept.
Replying to @jonni
@jonni @unpelt @Meaningness @ssica3003 @TheAnnaGat Yeah yeah! Vulfpeck is the house band!
@aaronzlewis @eriktorenberg This sort of thing is increasingly possible with the people I spend time with 😛
@visakanv Oh man Visa this thread reminded me of this short film, which I think you'll really enjoy (by @tato_tweets) abs-tract.org/art-film
@garybasin This looks like a job for... @elonmusk! (Seriously we need more people who are able to make these major rebrands happen, but it seems like it's just him.)
@webdevMason @ToKTeacher And then the question is "what causes someone to try?" —on timescales of hours or days/weeks. Which then connects back with The Desire To Pass Tests (not sure if you mentioned this; haven't watched video) hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/113360634…
Retweeted @visakanv
Everywhere children are born free and everywhere they are in chains
@visakanv (Answered Kinda) I'm Canadian, and when I spent time in SF, people would ask me "what did you think of... America?" and I was like "I didn't go to "America", I went to SF". The fractal subcultures of countries, cities, etc, make foreignness an odd thing to track.
@visakanv (There are multiple things I'm saying in the previous tweet. One of them is that it seemed implied by the person's use of "America" that they were referencing Red Tribe America—which is the only one that calls *itself* America—whereas SF is very Blue/Grey) slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-c…
@visakanv From that same SSC post... even if I *did* go to Red Tribe America, I still would probably be almost entirely interacting with my friends, who aren't part of that culture. And yet, as Visa's photos of the diffs between SF & SG re drugs illustrate, the scene is still different.
Replying to @coyotespike
@coyotespike @Meaningness *has this bookmarked for a week* *finally opens* *looks at table of contents* *sees "this essay is a waste of time"* *jumps to that section* *reads* *nods* *considers just closing the page* *posts this tweet instead* ...now what? Oops started scrolling up. Guess I'm reading it!
@coyotespike @Meaningness Oooh yeah I really like this essay! > The more and longer you observe that most meanings stand independent of one another, the more absurd becomes the notion that the vastness of space destroys the many rippling meanings that make up a worthwhile human life.
@coyotespike @Meaningness > if we don’t matter to a cosmic observer, neither should the cosmic observer’s opinion matter to us I've had a similar thought before: impostor's syndrome & Groucho's "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." mutually obliterate each other.🤯
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@coyotespike @Meaningness > if we don’t matter to a cosmic observer, neither should the cosmic observer’s opinion matter…
Junto legit looks like a solid facebook killer! ...provided it can manage to get off the ground at all. At least initially though it doesn't look like it'll support threads or other key features to make it my dream #TwitterReplacement
@fortelabs Somehow I want to mash this tweet up with these two: twitter.com/fortelabs/stat… twitter.com/gordonbrander/…
@visakanv Me too! So I wear it! I've got a Desigual ladies top on in this photo:
jailbreaking the human operating system
@drethelin Also increasingly it's not okay to have one servant (with whom you have an ongoing relationship) but it's okay to have a thousand milliservants who drive you places, cook your food, clean your house., but who you never meet. Democratization of such services! ...also atomization🤔
@drethelin I ain't shouldin' nothin'! 🤷 youtube.com/watch?v=JrvFM5…
@QiaochuYuan New idea is obviously to use a gender-swapped version of your own face.
@visakanv Here's it in full, and my other ladies Desigual top. I love like 50% of the Desigual designs I've seen and would own way more if my wallet didn't have a say 🤑 (I don't care at all for brands as such; my rship with "Desigual" is "they make art I want to wear")
This new street art is something else. I want to call my city council about it but I don't know whether to ask them to remove it or keep it forever.
Retweeted @Prigoose
What if Twitter added a visual, topical way of exploring tweets, that ignores chronology altogether? Like a mindmap, but with…
@Conaw > an invention that doesn't spread is hardly worth calling an "invention" at all. We don't, we call it a "patent application", or maybe a "patent". @KevinSimler
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@Conaw > an invention that doesn't spread is hardly worth calling an "invention" at all. We don't, we call it a "patent…
@Conaw @fortelabs Muahaha I love how now a whole bunch of people are staring at these limitations of twitter. Maybe there's hope that @jack will actually make a #ConversationalTwitter so we won't need a #TwitterReplacement
@aaronzlewis @QiaochuYuan @visakanv @TheAnnaGat what was the other rec?
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @visakanv @aaronzlewis @QiaochuYuan @TheAnnaGat Yeah his interviews are great! This is my fav intro, would love to hear other ones you liked: metalearn.net/podcasts/ml41-…
@patrissimo Worth mentioning Bongard Problems—which are still a puzzle in the sense that they don't work out your whole mind nor your body—they are interesting in that they're designed to be approached obliquely rather than through direct analysis See meaningness.com/metablog/bonga…
@patrissimo The account @BongardDaily tweets one out every day. Here are four. The puzzle is "what makes the six boxes on the left different from the six on the right?" Hundreds more: foundalis.com/res/bps/bpidx.…
@garybasin @elonmusk Wow, I'm legit surprised about this given everything else I've seen. Had the impression of him as being very much in favor of friendly competition that all favors the bigger-picture goal...
@jondubin @alifeofmovement Haha yes this is delightful.
@visakanv @RaleighC I'm very excited for AR/MR workspace, where I can still be "in my room" but also have a bunch of other stuff laid out that I can swipe through in midair.
@DellAnnaLuca @garybasin Huh interesting, yeah.
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
Honing mode vs Jamming mode (in conversation) goo.gl/NnzneK #Communication #DivergentThinking #Brainstorming h…
@QiaochuYuan @Scientific_Bird @s_r_constantin Something something theatre/music nerds something something
@anielsen108 Sounds like Delancey Street (program in SF where lifetime criminals learn to live differently) youtube.com/watch?v=gW-pzS…
@Conaw @kirisima What genre of thing is this? Random clip plus backing music... I'm not sure how many more I want to watch but it's more than zero.
Imagining a beautiful future is the closest thing to a revolutionary act there is left.
@jondubin @Conaw @QiaochuYuan @uncatherio @visakanv Yeah, my dream is one that shows you how many times each tweet has been quote-tweeted but I think that with Twitter's current api etc it wouldn't work. Their search is imperfect for this plus it would be pretty heavy load and eventually get blocked somehow.
@Conaw @jondubin @QiaochuYuan @uncatherio @visakanv In my #TwitterReplacement concept, that # would absolutely be shown on every tweet, next to the reply, retweet, & ♥ counts... ...but yes, that probably wouldn't work for a hacky extension. The thing is, how do you know when you want to pop that iframe up?
@Conaw @jondubin @QiaochuYuan @uncatherio @visakanv Even for @visakanv, the majority of his tweets haven't ever been quoted. (I haven't checked, but I'd guess it's 3-20%. Not counting tweets that are just themselves quoting another tweet, because of course you'd never quote one of those...)
@QiaochuYuan @Aella_Girl "Yes and so far as an adult I barely interact with children so idk."
@Prigoose Compromise seems better than common-to-US/Canada tug of war where a policy gets reversed before you can even find out if it works, but sometimes compromise yields something that *nobody* thinks is a good idea, so when it doesn't work, nobody has been disproven.
@Prigoose This thinking came from reading this fascinating article by Karl Popper that caused me to question a bunch of my assumptions about electoral systems. To be clear, I don't agree with all of what he says here. But I'm less confident in my old opinions!🤔 economist.com/democracy-in-a…
Retweeted @paulg
"Neither side can know with certainty which variant will come to pass. And, funnily enough, both sides seem to think that the mo…
Thread · Complex systems and the limits of Deutsch's optimism · 1 of 16 tweets
@cognazor @KeenDisregard @dthorson Ooh, and here's an article where someone who used to be not worried about climate change didn't change their probability assessment but DID realize "wait, even if this is not likely, we should still do stuff to make sure we're safe".
If you should too much you might end up with a dislocated should-er.
@marcinignac @Conaw @fortelabs Do it! I have lots of ideas for UIs if you're serious about it & want to chat.
@selfprime Oh yeah? Curious to hear more if it's possible (and sensible) to share!
@webdevMason Visa tweeting about this at the same time... I find myself wondering if the solution (for those not already famous) is to aggressively block anyone who engages with you in a detracting way, well before you reach even 10k, to keep things fun.
@visakanv @webdevMason Nice. Makes me think that Twitter could use a personal-shadow-ban system, which is sort of like block except the user has no idea, but unlike mute it prevents any replies-from-them-to-you from showing up to your followers as well. blog.codinghorror.com/suspension-ban…
@visakanv @webdevMason And then a next phase, though dangerous, would be a system that automatically detects when someone has made an asshole reply to you, and puts them in the shadow-ban category *for* you. For ++conversationality, it could not-do-this for anyone followed by someone you follow.
@visakanv My first time in SF (before I knew anyone) I was interning at a tech company. Jan'13. Went to a cuddle party in Santa Cruz, and realized how touch-starved I'd been. Literally my physical contact in the prior few weeks had been: - handshakes & high-fives w coworkers - TSA patdown
@visakanv I later reflected on this experience in this blog post: malcolmocean.com/2014/09/tsa-pa…
Retweeted @housetrotter
we are absolutely getting 5g and it is absolutely going to kill people grist.org/article/5g-net…
@cowtung @visakanv @webdevMason Yeah 😖 ...I appreciate you sharing that. I think that this is an example where positive & negative feedback are importantly different, and it's important to orient to the positive. Which comments get enjoyable engagement? Head more in that direction.
@selfprime Totally understood! Glad I expressed my curiosity anyway. I'll return to this thread in a year or two and ask again then 😉
@visakanv I'd be interested in seeing whatever sources on this you're finding most rich/valuable/dense/insightful!
@hunchandblunder They're not necessarily false... they could both be representations that contain key but incomplete information (which is what "true" means) but that you don't know how to integrate coherently. Need to be able to hold that without assuming one is wrong. civilizationemerging.com/higher-dimensi…
Replying to @SlowwCo
@slowwco @16Personalities Enneagram has been valuable for me, for 2 reasons. I am very well-modelled as a 7 (with 8-wing) so that has helped me see some of my own patterns and blindspots.👁 Also, recognizing that there were other people out there who resonated with the other types as much as me with 7🤯
@Conaw Hmm this is making me want to have another twitter acct that I can use for threading ideas/thoughts like this, private so I don't have to... - explain unfamiliar concepts or shorthand - track how they're all going to land for others - provide context for other people - etc
@Conaw It's occurring to me that except for concerns about saying things that land awkwardly (which is minor issue compared to context) it could actually work to have a public @Malcolm_Scratchpad account or w/e, and then I can use tweets from there in this acct's threads organically!
@Conaw It would probably end up attracting followers anyway, but presumably fewer and they'd know what they were in for. And those followers' replies might help me develop my thoughts. Hmm... 🤔
@Conaw (Relatedly, I've also found myself wanting to tweet entire blog posts so I can quote-tweet sentences from them etc. This scratchpad account might enable/encourage me to tweet out blog post drafts as well! Although I guess that's kind of a different thing. More hmm.)
@Conaw Now I'm staring at workflowy like "isn't this all just threads?" Top level: pinned ultra-meta-thread Within that, meta-threads collecting threads [pinned] ↳[topics I'm actively exploring] ↳mcgilchrist🧠 ↳dzogchen ↳dem primary / buttigieg ↳[misc links] ↳[...]
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@Conaw Now I'm staring at workflowy like "isn't this all just threads?" Top level: pinned ultra-meta-thread Within that…
@micahtredding @Conaw *subscribe*
@webdevMason Yeah, whenever someone I know wants to learn to code, I suggest they pick some project they want to build that they can make any headway on at all, and just start working on it. Learning then comes purposefully, rather than solving toy problems for a tutorial.
@webdevMason Tech things I'd never touched before I started building complice.co:😮 - sending/receiving emails on server (thanks @Mail_Gun) - databases - caching - templates (mustache) - accounts, login, password hashing - javascript+audio - https / SSL - payments (thanks @stripe)
@webdevMason and that's just a pretty standard list of the sorts of main things you'd think a web developer would already know! ...there are tons of more specific or obscure things I've since had to learn to continue building Complice! (WebRTC, various APIs, twilio, OAuth, CDNs, gulp, etc...)
@jdunck @Conaw I actually do have fragmention set up on my site!! But it's still not as good.
Replying to @brownian19
@brownian19 @devonzuegel Jelly Comb Ultra Slim Foldable BT Keyboard amzn.to/2YOJrKd Folded up, it's like 4x6" and 0.5" thick. Same size as a large smartphone, it fits easily into any reasonable pocket.
Thread · Why todo lists miss deep work, and needing four inboxes · 1 of 6 tweets
@callumflack Just saw this again & reminded me of my observation yesterday that I need 4+ different inboxes: - idea / thought / connection / pun / link - something I may want to do - task I definitely need to do soon - random bit of info to store (eg my blood pressure from a particular date)
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@callumflack Just saw this again & reminded me of my observation yesterday that I need 4+ different inboxes: - idea / th…
Thread · Why todo lists miss deep work, and needing four inboxes · 4 of 6 tweets
@callumflack The first of these wants a Zettelkasten (aka @fortelabs' Second Brain)
@callumflack @fortelabs Second & Fourth can just be a random list in workflowy. For #3 ("task I definitely need to do soon") I currently use a little android app called Three Do, which lets you quickly create reminders. I guess a good time to do it, then snooze til done. threedo.app
@callumflack @fortelabs What's nice about separating urgent & important things from the others is that it means I really can ignore my list and so I don't need a GTD-esque workflow for regularly processing my inbox.
@callumflack @fortelabs And of course I use Complice for goal-oriented tasks that I want to do today or tomorrow.
Meaninglessnesslessness, n. The property of being entirely devoid of meaninglessness. In other words, completely and entirely made of meaning.
Fun approaches to debugging! #1 Pretend I am the working module of code and explain how I'm able to do all of the things I can do (great for a situation where goddamnit it sure seems like the module should be able to handle all of these scenarios and edge-cases)
#2 Pretend I am one existing module of code and another buggy module is my coworker, and explain why I just can't possibly work with that guy. (These two both came from work in 2017 on building an offline-sync module. Helped surface intuitions about what info I needed.)
common knowledge... 🤔 common knowns. common unknowns. common unknown unknowns.
@rjgoodin Ahh shit, I didn't tag the original tweet #neologizing or #neologisms or whatever. Gotta keep track of my creations.
Replying to @brownian19
@brownian19 @callumflack @gtdguy Ahh hadn't explicitly thought of the UX tie-in but that makes a lot of sense.
@brownian19 @callumflack @gtdguy I was actually probably thinking XP from the old pokémon gameboy games.
@micahtredding @Conaw This sounds AGI-complete.
@visakanv I once did an experiment with a friend where one person mouthed speaking as if with a particular accent (French, Russian, etc) and the other person guessed which accent. We were accurate like 50% of the time, which given the number of accents is quite a result.
@visakanv Did a double-take after thinking that these were all part of the same list.
@DellAnnaLuca For any of these I highly recommend checking out Iain McGilchrist's book The Master and his Emissary, which talks extensively about the roles of the relationships between the R & L hemispheres in learning, confabulation, decision-making.
Replying to @minobenjo
@SlaytonBenjamin @visakanv "We were accurate like 50% of the time, which given the number of accents is quite a result." "which given the number of accents is quite a result" "given the number of accents" ☝
Retweeted @made_in_cosmos
@visakanv As they say, you go on Facebook to talk with people from your past, you go on Twitter to talk with people fro…
Replying to @minobenjo
@SlaytonBenjamin @visakanv That day he and I probably went through French, German, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Indian, Scottish, English... maybe 1-2 others. I don't think either of us knew the accents well. The point (see Visa's original tweet) is that people hold their faces differently to speak diff'ly.
@alifeofmovement Currently listening to Chapter 1 of The Music Lesson and finding it very self-conscious. Does it get... less-so? I'm enjoying the interplay of the music & story though!
@alifeofmovement Okay this is much better in Chapter 2 now that he's actually playing out the dialogue rather than just talking about it.
@alifeofmovement Okay great we get to watch the self-consciousness defeating itself. This is delightful. ~"I tried to assert my dominance. He was winning."
@alifeofmovement I'm basically hearing this as a dialogue between the left hemisphere and right hemisphere, which... ...makes sense in the context of this as a spiritual lesson.
@Timber_22 Welcome back, apparently! Twitter's grown some fun new pieces since you were here last! I don't know much about you but here's an intro thread I made for someone else:
Thread · Onboarding newcomers into Twitter's threading culture · 2 of 9 tweets
Was sharing this intro thread with @Timer_22 today and found myself noting some subtle changes even just in the 7.5 weeks since I tweeted it. The first is that it's not just @visakanv & @GRITCULT that I'm seeing doing dense inter-linking now. Myself, @QiaochuYuan, @Conaw...
And not just a few individuals, but a sense that a growing number of people are creating a more generative culture on twitter than has been seen here before. Curiosity, discussion, play! Threads on this:
@Timber_22 @alifeofmovement I've been tweeting a lot about Iain McGilchrist btw, so if that's a topic of interest for you then 👇
Model: there are different cognitive OSes that run on different underlying architectures; recently the LHem architecture (linear, decoupled) got an upgrade that made it overpowered. Now we need a new OS for the RH architecture (nonlinear, contextual) so it can contain LH again.
(The above tweet is an experiment with a compression that probably won't make sense unless you've checked out Iain McGilchrist's work. Start with this podcast metalearn.net/podcasts/ml41-… or maybe these these threads of mine: )
@Timber_22 Yep! I've been working on something full-time for years that I just realized this year represents an answer to this question. And one way of pointing at that looks something like:
@Timber_22 @philiprshepherd Haven't, no! I've seen his book New Self, New World on our shelves, next to New World New Mind 🤣 Link the thread here if/when you make it!
Retweeted @Timber_22
@Malcolm_Ocean Design challenge: LHem will be needed to help write code and documentation for emerging RHem OS. Potential…
@Timber_22 Ha! Yes, definitely. It's actually basically an inevitability that the code will be faulty, because whether or not there's intentional deception, the RH is in general oriented towards things that lose their magic when talked about!
@Timber_22 Reflecting, I think half of the challenge is not just designing an OS for the RH, but removing RH-hostile modules from the LH. So it needs a major patch as well. But it's more "LH, learn to let go" and not "LH, learn to do these things"
Retweeted @mrgunn
There's loose federation of communities, including @whatstheii @TheAnnaGat @QiaochuYuan @meaningness @Malcolm_Ocean which talks…
Retweeted @Conaw
Dangerous playgrounds are safer nytimes.com/2019/05/10/wel…
@mrgunn One thing I keep a look-out for is suspicious detail or certainty. Need to be able to recognize when your attempt to eff the ineffable is totally f'd, and acknowledge that.
@mrgunn As @HareeshWallis says "every time a teacher describes this, he or she fails. so our job is to fail as well as we possibly can". Among people who recognize they are trying to point at nonconceptual things, I regularly hear such caveats. Among woomeisters, overconfidence.
🤯 right understanding 🎯 right intention 🗣️ right speech 🖐️ right action 🧠 right hemisphere 🤑 right livelihood 👁️ right attention 🏌️ right concentration 🧘 right meditation
"Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It's enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it." — Claude Monet
Just found myself using the word "zettelkasting" in my notes.
@noididntreadit Also, particularly for someone like me or @LordChisholm whose memories are very organized by time, it's worth knowing since:2019-05-01 until:2019-05-01 for searching periods of time. (Note this is different than eg gmail, which uses before/after)
@Timber_22 @visakanv @GRITCULT @QiaochuYuan @Conaw
@visakanv @GRITCULT @i_amm_nobody I've started doing this as well! Could probably stand to do it more. There's "how do you get words in common so general searches return everything?" and "how do you get unique words so you can find something specific?" (these constraints don't conflict that much)
@visakanv Aha! Not sure I'd seen this thread before but it's gold. I think I've been starting to learn some of these things from watching you do them, so it might be that 500 threads required for pioneering, but then the moves become more widely available.
@eriktorenberg Not sure! One thought is humor lives almost entirely in the right-hemisphere, and the world has become increasingly left-hemisphere-dominated over the last century. Also humor+seriousness=paradox, and to LH, paradox means "one of these must go".
@eriktorenberg Relatedly, laughter & control don't go together. If someone thinks we can only deal with serious things by controlling them, then laughter feels like a threat to that.
@dela3499 @EmmaJP9_ @Z_Jacobi pointed out to me a few months ago that any referendum about a complex decision needs to require way more than 50% of the vote to implement, because otherwise eg it can get 51% of the vote for "some brexit" but no given instantiation of brexit gets more than 30% support
@dela3499 @EmmaJP9_ @Z_Jacobi To be clear, this isn't arguing with what @dela3499 is saying; sometimes it makes sense to test something that many people think is a bad idea. My point is that it's important to be able to disambiguate between those two things.
It's too late not to go slowly.
@dela3499 @EmmaJP9_ @Z_Jacobi 1. What popular opinion is of something 2. What's going to happen based on 1 These get confused by bad questions all the time: the % of Americans who wanted Donald Trump as president is way lower than the # who voted for him. Many saw him as best of two terrible options.
@tommycollison I like to work with people who: A) want to maximize throughput B) want to maximize enjoyment C) don't see any conflict between A & B (if there is a conflict, find something different to work on!)
@dela3499 @EmmaJP9_ @Z_Jacobi Haven't looked into this much (it seems to me like the sort of thing that's often true, and was particularly true in USA 2016 elections) but here's one poll result: washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/w…
@dela3499 @EmmaJP9_ @Z_Jacobi Another source, from before 2016 election: > "Regardless of the strength of their attachment to their own party, the more voters dislike the opposing party, the greater the probability that they will vote consistently for their own party’s candidates." vox.com/2015/4/24/8489…
@vgr The tedium is the message The medium is the massage The mediocre is the message
Replying to @robertwiblin
@robertwiblin @ESYudkowsky I think what @ESYudkowsky is saying is that it's less "how confident I am about this" but "here's the context of how I came to think this is worth saying"... which in particular provides context for <what to do with any disagreement>
Just searched twitter for any to:meditationstuff -from:meditationstuff ...to find this tweet by @webdevMason so I could find a term that @meditationstuff had used earlier in the thread (it was "protocol analysis") #TwitterAsMemex
Retweeted @makoConstruct
makoconstruct.typeform.com/to/ZHl2KL Trying to test a brain theory. If you'd answer these 5 simple questions, I'd greatly appreciate…
@makoConstruct Was hard to answer 1st Q because I rarely watch movies... my revealed pref is that I mostly watch them in theaters but we're talking like 2/year average over the last 5 years. I've written about spatialization (distinct from visualization) in this thread:
@visakanv Excellent book called Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, which, iirc, basically opens with "if you're reading this book, you're probably some sort of shaman" then talks about integrating shamany perspective into modern/urban life. amzn.to/2wkOKon
Retweeted @makoConstruct
This is the closest thing I've seen to logical explosion... if a person admits one falsehood... in theory, isn't that a…
@makoConstruct Hmm... my own revealed preference is not based on that. On the contrary, I think sometimes there are films I wouldn't bother seeing not in theatres, b/c immersion (sound as much as sight) makes a difference.
Thread · Simulating memetic spread and the incentives of academic research
Great piece by @KevinSimler! It uses simple agent-grids to model the spread of genes (ie infections) and memes (ie ideas/theories) through populations.
It's a great demonstration of the nonlinear effects of simple parameters (transmission rate). Below a certain threshold, an infection consistently dies out. Above, it spreads. Most people profoundly don't appreciate how many things in the world are like this.
What small changes produce huge compounding results? I was inspired to come back to twitter 2 years ago based on realizing that by just being a bit more public with my ideas, I could build a ton of relationships.
I would love to see @KevinSimler or @ncasenmare or someone else develop some more simulations of nonlinear or complex system dynamics, to give people better intuitions for these.
I want to highlight something specific about memetic model in Kevin's essay, which is talking about the importance of academia. He describes a tension between academia providing valuable networks but bad incentives. Then has a simulation demonstrating negative fx of careerists.
I read this mini-ebook a few days ago that suggests that the incentives of academia are actually so bad that nearly everyone ends up functioning as a careerist scientist, not a real scientist. I don't agree with everything in this essay, but it got me 🤔 thestoryofscience.blogspot.com
(The conclusion of the link above is that basically almost no real science is happening anymore, which honestly resonates a lot with @slatestarcodex's depiction of drug research. I guess that's industry, not academia?? Still, FDA busted incentives.) slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/22/the…
So my steelman of what Kevin is saying is that having networks of people researching is extremely important. And I think that it would be pretty fascinating to use some similar simulations with a dozen more parameters, to investigate what would make those networks optimal.
How does "publish or perish" look in a simulation? How does p-hacking show up? What about file drawer (nonpublication) effect? What role do peer-review/gatekept journals play? What other factors are there that cause some theories to spread more than others?
Now I'm thinking that some stuff from @DavidDeutschOxf's work on memes, criticism & culture could be inspirational for designing alternative research communities...
When I think about research communities/networks, I also imagine some incredible possibilities with platforms like twitter or something @Conaw might build, as being contexts for people to notice connections between theories they're working on & build together.
Retweeted @webdevMason
@naval @SamHarrisOrg @EricRWeinstein @MichaelMatcha @Kasparov63 @AndrewYang The *possibility* of creative work is largely…
Thread · How authoritarian cultures suppress creativity by undermining self-trust · 5 of 6 tweets
The Guru Papers talks about how self-trust is consistently undermined by authoritarian cultures (read: almost all cultures in the world today, to greater and lesser degrees) creating internal battles for control.
@visakanv comments on the lack of self-trust thing here here:
Visa then goes on to describe the creativity that results from learning to value your own experience & feelings:
The Beginning of Infinity by @DavidDeutschOxf points out that this link between self-trust and creativity (or lack of both) is not a coincidence! If people are creative, they will innovate new solutions to their problems. New memes. Culture changes.
Therefore, in order for a society's memeplex to be stable, it needs to inhibit peoples' creativity, which it does by putting them at war with themselves.
@visakanv Made a QT reply to you, which experiments with quoting each of these tweets in succession so they form part of my thought-train.
@visakanv This seems like a fascinating new mode of conversation. People have done similar things with blogs before, deconstructing an entire post piece-by-piece, but somehow it seems way cooler if you get to click through to the original.
Thread · How authoritarian cultures suppress creativity by undermining self-trust · 1 of 6 tweets
We've started to crawl out of the pit of the purely static attractor, but our cultures still inherit a ton of baggage that impairs peoples' creativity! In transition, quite far from being able to make a relaxed fall into a new dynamic attractor.
"I shouldn't should" = a double bind reduction
@QiaochuYuan Related to former obviousness of power-dynamics:
🔑🧵
@micahtredding Shit! Glad you're okay enough to tweet about this. ...there's clearly a need for some other first-responders than police to this sort of situation. (Especially given the current state of policing in America)
@fortelabs #FailureModeAndEffectsAnalysis (also warning the video is quite graphic (mostly violence/injury))
Retweeted @mizroba
Really interesting story by Hans Rosling:
@chaosprime I had a line of javascript once that read: okay.then(what => {
@QiaochuYuan Hmm, seems that link is something about heavenly reward earned by showing kindness to the helpless. (etymology of thank ~= reward as well) etymonline.com/word/mercy#ety…
@QiaochuYuan See also this translation of the french etymologie, from my earlier thread twitter.com/Introspectah/s…
Replying to @cosimia_
@cosimia_ Crowdfunding, eg @The_Corres thecorrespondent.com
How do we make decisions while we don't know the answer to this question?
@typeform I'm getting a bug where after I submit a form, it warns me when I try to close a tab. This is EXTREMELY unnerving. It gives the impression you just lost all of my data (in practice, it seems it usually goes through) (I'm using Brave 0.59.35 (Chromium: 72.0.3626.81))
~"Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. He clearly got up on the wrong side of bed. There is only one serious question: Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself." ~T Robbins
(above quotation edited (that's what the first "~" means in my grammar) to fit in one tweet. here's the full version, as I found it in this post by @algekalipso qualiacomputing.com/2018/11/07/ant…)
@visakanv This related early @existentialcoms strip produced a profound insight for me related to internal conflict. Not sure I can articulate that insight—it was more embodied than conceptual. My tip is to seek a way to transcend the argument in this comic: existentialcomics.com/comic/13
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@visakanv This related early @existentialcoms strip produced a profound insight for me related to internal conflict. No…
Retweeted @devilscompiler
Politically correct culture is a decentralized surveillance state.
@Prigoose There's an organization that's making community spaces for homeless people in Austin. Seems quite well-designed, optimized to give people some amount of privacy but also with front-porches, community kitchens, jam sessions, etc to facilitate connection. cnn.com/2019/03/26/us/…
@visakanv For the other people who want to hear the whole thing: youtube.com/watch?v=AF-Kag…
Replying to @typeformhelp
@typeformhelp The browser uses the same rendering engine as chrome, but blocks lots of scripts & other things for privacy.
Thread · The double bind of teaching independence, and showing instead of teaching · 3 of 5 tweets
@QiaochuYuan Might as well reductio this to its obvious absurdum: Things that should be taught in school: 🙃how not to should
@QiaochuYuan See these pages, which use "Don't be so obedient" as an example of a classic double-bind. "teach to be independent" is basically isomorphic.
@QiaochuYuan relatedly, from Victor Wooten's The Music Lesson: (HT @alifeofmovement) "I cannot teach you because no one can teach another person anything." "What do you mean by that?" "You can only teach yourself... I can teach you nothing. I can only *show* you things."
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
Several of these things can't meaningfully be taught in schools as they stand today, because the structure of school itsel…
Thread · The double bind of teaching independence, and showing instead of teaching · 2 of 5 tweets
@QiaochuYuan @alifeofmovement & huh, once we ask "what should we SHOW kids?" (vs "teach") it starts to ask something different of the "teachers". It suggests a learning context where teachers themselves: 👂 empathize 🍉 are actively learning ☀️ have independence 💔 handle tough emotions 🔍 make big decisions
@QiaochuYuan @alifeofmovement 2 things on @emilyca's original list were: 💀how to think about death & grief 💦quality sex & consent ed Here it gets controversial. What if some of your teachers were dying, and sharing their process? What would it mean to *show* quality sex? (age-appropriately, obv)
@typeformhelp I can try that, but longterm, you could have more Brave users than you think due to lack of analytics, and this conflicting message is very stressful. As a form creator, I wouldn't want to send typeforms to people if I know it'll freak some of them out. twitter.com/typeformhelp/s…
Replying to @innerstitial
@AndJohnsonAnd You're looking for Zettelkasten:
@makoConstruct Yeah, there are ways of doing shoulding that don't tie people in knots... ...in practice people tend not to do these! (Basically (which is maybe what you're saying?) any should is a claim about how to achieve a particular end, and what gets busted is when the end is left off.)
@makoConstruct "You should go to college IF you want a college degree" "I should get off twitter IF I want to focus on something else right now" (in practice these sorts of statements tend to imply "...and you/I should want the conditional", which just buries the normativity one layer deeper)
@makoConstruct ...and post-normative norms are possible!
@visakanv Check out The Guru Papers. It outlines the structural dynamics of how this stuff happens, and the implications. It's one of the books that's blown my mind the most in the last few years 🤯
@visakanv I'm excited to revisit Guru Papers in light of my recent reading around the brain hemispheres and how the LHem fixates on certainty. There's definitely something relevant there. Oh! I already have some notes on Authoritarianism & brains, from reading theauthoritarians.org/why-do-trumps-…
@visakanv strongiosity strongulation strongitude stronghood
@makoConstruct 😉 I see what you did there. Yeah, deleting the word is useless; your mind will substitute a new one promptly. *playfully* attempting to eschew the word can bring useful attention to it, which allows introspecting: "what do I really want to say here?"
@QiaochuYuan @visakanv @Meaningness @Meaningness how about tweeting that entire post out as a thread, so we can QT the individual excerpts? (I mean, I could also do that, but seeing as he's the one who collected those particular excerpts I thought... Hm. I guess it's actually a huge amount of work. >100 tweets)
@QiaochuYuan @visakanv @Meaningness Okay, in a few minutes I've copied a quarter of them into twitter, so it doesn't actually take that long. @Meaningness, lmk if you want to be the one to do this, otherwise I will 🚀
@visakanv Resonated with this as well, and tried it for a couple of years... it faded into the background pretty quickly.
@visakanv which apparently is also what Japan calls itself? (if you don't recognize this gif, you'll probbbbably wanna watch this vid: youtube.com/watch?v=Mh5LY4…)
@visakanv Me when I tell @visakanv about something before searching to see if he's tweeted extensively about it already.
@visakanv Also oh man reaching the bottom of that bill wurtz thread to discover I was there in a past life:
Thread · Generic drug markups and the prospect of DIY insulin
Seeing that my OTC (over-the-counter) allergy pills costs 1-6¢ wholesale in developing countries, and noting that it cost me at least 10× that, and thinking "wow, even generic pharmaceuticals are huge profit."
Then thinking about this @IFTF newsletter I got today that has developed a simple no-patent recipe for making tons of insulin, and about drug-prices more generally... ...how hard are drugmakers going to fight to stop this DIY tech?
I don't have a coherent train of thought here so I'll just dump a bunch of relevant links: Here's a thread by someone who does #insulin4all activism twitter.com/lollydaggle/st…
Americans driving to Canada to buy insulin there. Note that Canadian insulin manufacturers are still making lots of profit compared to manufacturers in many other countries. newsweek.com/caravan-americ…
Story about a Swiss company selling pharmaceuticals to UNICEF *below* cost, thanks to ultra-efficient manufactoring & clever budgeting.
Synthesis: I imagine a world with a device that will efficiently synthesize insulin for self/friends, & the device would cost < 2 months' supply of insulin in USA. And yet, knowing lobbying, probably this device will be illegal, instead of the predatory pricing being illegal. 😧
Oh this is a link to the article from the IFTF newsletter about the DIY insulin: dw.com/en/do-it-yours…
@Aella_Girl @GarrettPetersen I think it's specific to your sphere. I heard someone observe that they used to know only way more trans men than trans women in their hippie activist community (Portland?) then when they moved to bay area tech/rationality scene, the ratio flipped to >95% the other way.
Thread · Distinguishing pain from harm, and discomfort from wanting to stop
"pain" and "harm" are different words, but both get implied by the word "hurt", so when I use the word "hurt" I make a point of being clear internally what I'm actually talking about. (this was one of my main takeaways from reading @julien's book Flinch years ago)
It doesn't have as clear of a linguistic distinction, but the same confusion manifests with less-extreme concepts, creating a fusion between "this is uncomfortable" and "I want to stop". Trying taking cold showers. Work out til you collapse. Not b/c it's virtuous, but as play!
What is this discomfort like?🤔 What happens in my mind as I strain to do 1 more pushup?💪 Can I relax my body as I turn on the cold water?🚿 What is this tension protecting me from? Am I safe? How do I know? What does broccoli actually really taste like?🥦 So much to notice!
You get a whole new palette of options when discomfort becomes just another flavor rather than intrinsically and necessarily aversive.
Retweeted @carlosdeIvalle
“The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection." — Johann Hari …
@jonnym1ller Relevant thread re "this should be taught in schools"
@micahtredding relatedly, this intriguing take: tor.com/2012/09/12/the…
@benlandautaylor Fascism was modernism taken seriously: control everything and make it perfect. (This is an oversimplified compression of a chapter from the second half of Iain McGilchrist's book The Master and his Emissary.)
Retweeted @tobyshorin
I dare you to get close enough to me that we both change
Retweeted @gordonbrander
Amazing visual storytelling about the Anthropocene. Up there with Koyaanisqatsi. twitter.com/fourthree_br/s…
@benlandautaylor Ah yeah my compression only captures that half. I think McGilchrist is looking at deeper underlying things, though I'm not sure if he's looking at the same underlying thing you're looking at though! In any case, I highly recommend his work—has transformed my introspection.
@benlandautaylor McGilchrist's book, The Master and his Emissary, is great but long and dense so I'd recommend starting with an interview to get a sense of it. This is my favorite: metalearn.net/podcasts/ml41-…
@micahtredding @Conaw have you seen zettelkasten.de? @micahtredding have you seen this thread by Conor? Ah yes you have, you liked it. Well, I'm leaving the link for future people:
Retweeted @made_in_cosmos
What On Earth Was I thinking When I chose to Communicate In words They only obscure An already Cloudy matter Now w…
@made_in_cosmos @QiaochuYuan Also @made_in_cosmos you might like Iain McGilchrist's work
@made_in_cosmos @QiaochuYuan I recommend this podcast as a place to start: metalearn.net/podcasts/ml41-… or if you just want to dive into my threads riffing on it:
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@visakanv Oh man hmu!
@visakanv cf The Still Face Experiment (not saying it's at all the same; big difference between still face from mom and still face from stranger, for one) youtube.com/watch?v=apzXGE…
@visakanv Heh, I'd be down. (Is this where the moodboard idea came from?)
@visakanv > "someone reciting the alphabet in a moving, poetic way" youtube.com/watch?v=xLrVPK…
@visakanv I've been digging his book (in audiobook form) where he lays all of this stuff out. Here's a thread where I gave some initial thoughts:
@visakanv @selfprime @webdevMason
@visakanv Herbie Hancock describing a similar realization he had early on playing with Miles Davis, and "right in the middle of Miles Davis' solo, I played the wrong chord. Sounded like a big mistake! ...and Miles paused for a second... then he played some notes that made my chord right."
@kirisima @Conaw @uncatherio @lukeprog Oh man here's another by the guy who did the "none of you bitches" one above: instagram.com/p/ByD1yOZnLBL/
@visakanv This thread needs, as its comic version, to be directed to this thread, where people are finding the natural musicality of people talking and then adding instrumentation.
